You draw the blinds & the morning sun burns your eyes, stinging like lemon juice poured from the yellow bottle, sticky and artificial. Pull back the plastic on the saline rinse, watch it spray clouds across your vision, shield your eyes. Life continues without you. Live like a ghost, remove the you from yourself, watch the world from the outside of a snowglobe. If you’re unhappy, shake it again and see where the white lands. No one has a say in where they go, so no one has anything to offer you. Nothing interesting, at least. It’s just you and your body. Whatever there is to do with it. All you know how to do is find ways to fill the time. You wake up with a stranger’s hair in your mouth and think, Ah, this is what I left home for. Simplicity, in a sense. Romance? No. But nonetheless, it’s love, the dirt of it. She doesn’t remember your name and it’s just what you wanted. The art of giving your body without giving yourself, impermanence and other coveted things. Two strangers stirring in the dark, waking the other up to offer nothing. Leaving empty-handed. I’d like to take a brief intermission from this thing we call existence. Every time I step back into New York, I want to kill myself. But then I call a friend from back home and I don’t do anything about it, and I tell my friends in New York how much I love them, and I don’t do anything about any of it.

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Alyssa Goldberg is a writer and photographer living in Boston. Her work appears in Teen Vogue, Paste Magazine, Hobart After Dark, Bullshit Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Alyssa is the Editor of Reformatting the Pain Scale. Find her on Twitter @alyssaegoldberg or at alyssaegoldberg.com.