clean-up on aisle four

It stays with you. At 3:00am and when you're alone at the bus stop. While you're grocery shopping and your drop a jar of pickles on the ground and the pickled juice pools around the shards of glass. While you comb your hair, and try to tame a straying strand with hairspray. Looking in the mirror, wondering how your face got to looking so old and tired and lonely. How your hands clasp over your knees when you sit in chairs, like you're trying to hide something in your lap.
It follows you. Through museums, it's so heavy on your back that the paintings sigh for you. The stillness in their eyes becomes heavy for your heart. It's fragile like eggshells, painted, speckled pale blue. It creeps through the air ducts at night, slanting the warm air; bottling it up. It hides itself at the bottom of a glass of wine, rolled inside a cigarette, and tucked in the pages of blank journals and weathered books. It makes you worthless. You don't just feel worthless, you are worthless. And helpless. And hopeless. It consumes.