I sit here in my opulently sad paracosm. High above the masses, sitting on common yellow sheets, I am untouchable. Untouchable from pain, from disappointment — but also from companionship, from newness. I leave the door open, to remind myself that my paracosm is not the only one that exists. We all have our paracosms in which we burrow. The strange, magnetic intersection of our paracosms — that might be attraction, that might be love.
But as I said, I leave the door open, lying in wait for that coveted intersection. So many faces pass me by, leaving me forgotten, and ruminating. I have faded from a quiet friend by the morning, to a relic, some old exhibit of quiet peculiarity. Oddness. A hermetic reminder of what being defective looks like.
And then you look at me. Again and again.
At first I think, “He’s not looking at me. Nobody sees me.”
But you keep passing by and in my periphery, I see glances that hold. Fixed intakes, doses of me. You’re trying to understand me and I don’t know why. I’m not your kind of woman, but the way you peer into my paracosm tells me that I might be. Or so you think. And I do not know if that confuses me or scares me more. Your look is nervous and complimentary, how one might look at nobility. And I am both flattered and saddened by such a notion. Only nobility suffers from crippling, beautiful disconnect.
Constance Button is an undergraduate student at San José State University, hailing from the Inland Empire area of Southern California.
The Bolt Magazine 