You rouse to the holler of a killer virus on the loose.
The trail of its ghostly sighs envelops your adjoining street — now a faraway field — in a shifting entropy of pale smoke.
You smirk.
Mostly because it’s a fitting metaphor for the colorless void of your dog days.
Listlessly, your glassy eyes saunter to a flock of pillowed birds heaving their tumescent plume, smudging the empty canvas of a sky with their trilling laughter.
It’s going to hurt, my love. These coming days that you’ll sip your morning tea like it’s the scorching sun. Pretending to not care. To not smell death in the air while every fifteen minutes, you cleanse your hands, relenting to this pressing need to sanitize your insides.
And you carry on. Carving the outlines of your life’s shell with bright, sleazy war paints of a survivor.
Cos you are one. You can feel it in your bones in the dead of the night, when you awaken hearing a violin-strummed elegy rife with the incident of a soul leaving the body.
So you smile to yourself faintly. You let the remainder of stars hatch in your skin. In the pulse of life’s moving stills, you remind yourself to be brave, to find beauty, to raise flags while you still can. And so, you take a deep breath and wait. With hollowed cheeks pressed to a grimy window. Waiting for a green signal that’s yet to come.
