Spilled Milk
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Not for nothing — a stream of reluctant consciousness.
Tip, dump, wipe, groan.
I make plans with myself, it’s how I maintain boundaries with others.
A sad song for tears, then something with heavy bass for anger. Learning that happiness will come.
Outfits picked out in my head for that vengeful scene in movies that never seem to happen in real life. We’re too global to casually bump into anyone anymore.
Vodka on a split lip — the goth kid within revels in the sting; I’m already rationalizing with my inner therapist that it doesn’t count as self harm.
I sit to absorb.
Tip.
It doesn’t shatter. Not because it’s plastic, like you’d give a kid. It was a gentle, hopeful nudge. The glass teetered for a second, almost as if it might settle.
I’m thinking about cigarettes and Doc Martens. I could splash in the milk in my Doc Martens. Polish them later. Right now I just want to be cooler than I feel.
A hot neck grows on the back of my head, but it’s not embarrassment; it’s astonishment at the fact that after so many tipped glasses, the glass could tip yet again.
I guess that is the risk you run when you pour the milk.
Dump.
It’s like trying to make a decision when it’s really already been made, and I’m just fooling myself.
Fear swims laps through my body. A slap-slap-slap of nerves on the tips of my toes, almost as if I was on the dock of a rough sea, being reminded that something as soft as water has the elasticity of a rubber band.
I almost have to admire the milk as it pillows wherever it pleases.
The right (wrong?) song comes on, tears overflow in a matter of seconds. I’m inconsolable but only for a minute or two.
Dumping, everywhere, utterly helpless. The glass has tipped, the milk is spilling — for a second there’s nothing to be done but to admire the volume, the gravity, the inertia.
Beautiful, this mess, out of my control in this very moment. My heart swells, tears exploding; not for the revelation itself, but just the breath after and yet quite before…
