Her sandaled feet tapped nervously on the linoleum floor, casually pausing to toy with the stains that decorated the haphazardly assembled tiles. She smirked at the persistent circles and blotches that refused to surrender to her soles.

A tug-of-war erupts between the acute sadness in her eyes and the subdued smile from her lips as she stares at horribly mismatched walls of the lobby: urine yellow behind the receptionist, vomit green to her right, and an angry sky blue to her left. Leaning back, she rests her freshly shaved head on the blister beige wall behind her.

They won’t understand, she thinks. I can’t even imagine how their reality can’t seem more imagined to them my so-called imaginary reality. She chuckles at her own verbal recursive loops between reality and the imagined.

The door opened, and a middle-aged man stepped out, smiling, escorting an elderly couple out. They were sobbing. And that made her tap her feet more. And the vomit green and blister beige suddenly became more saturated.

Crisp sports blazer. Slacks. White shirt. No tie. His chest hair creeping up from under his shirt, peeking out between the buttons, as if seeking other follicular acquaintances out there.

She sat still.

He smiled and beckoned her in.

She did not budge.

“It’s ok. Come on in,” he bellowed, with a criminally fraudulent smile. “Your father can come in, too – if you’d like.”

She quietly followed him into his office. It looked stale and smelled like formaldehyde. Well, that’s not entirely true since she has never really recognized the scent of formaldehyde. But if she had known, then that is what it would be – formaldehyde, sitting comfortably in the counselor’s office, its formaldehyde-smelling feet tossed casually onto the formaldehyde-smelling table … kicking back and relaxing … formaldehyde-style.

I feel dead , she thinks.

“So what is the problem?” he asks, after she sits down on a folding metal chair.

“There is no problem,” she retorts.

She does not tap her feet on the floor anymore. Instead, she sits upright, stiff, her eyes casually wandering over every formaldehyde-smelling inch of the room.

“Hello? Are you still with me?”

She barely heard his voice from within the insulated walls of her reveries.

“Hm?”

“Your father here tells me that you do not eat or talk to people. Do you think that’d be cause for concern?”

“I eat enough.”

“And talking to people around you?”

“If there is a need to say something, I will.”

“So you don’t think family is important?”

She looks at his dusty books tucked away into the sprawling shelves: God and Family … The Disciplined Child …

“That is not what I said,” she objects softly.

“Strange – ” I whispered, trying to smuggle some cold air up into my nostrils, past the ruffle of her unruly, lemongrass scented mess of an afro.

“What is?” She remained snuggled into my scrawny frame, sharing the fleece blanket to shield us from the biting winter breeze on the patio. Frankly, it was as effective as dressing a bullet wound with a band-aid.

“Your dandruff,” I replied, still reeling from the remnants of tetrahydrocannabinol shimmying along in my brain cells. “It actually tastes good.” Apparently, the only segue I had out of awkward silences was my penchant for even more awkward absurdities.

(more…)

Waking up on a Sunday morning is always a sensory overload. Especially here: a damp basement where mold and dust marry each other, and erupt into an unsavory odor of their own microbial consummation. Debris ejaculate smells like mildew. The air becomes an expansive womb that carries little dust-mold fetuses, bellicose zygotes that take absurd amounts of delight from being my nasal disasters.Compound this with the fumes from oil paint still drying on haphazard canvasses, cigarette smoke, and the toxicity of my own breath, and you have the perfect recipe for respiratory apocalypse quarantined within these four walls.

It must be at least noon. The sun has managed to force its way through the army of dust that stands guard on the window pane. Morning sun cannot do that. Morning sun is lethargic, nursing its malaise at having to break the stratosphere. No, this was definitely noon sun. Or later, even.

I squint at the tiny window buried a few inches next to the door that gives out to the sidewalk. The frequent vroom of cars outside affirms that the world had not died in my sleep.

(more…)

“Just do your thing, man. It’s all yours,” he bellowed, dramatically gesticulating towards one empty white wall of his new condo’s dining room. It wasn’t furnished, yet. In fact, the place looked like it needed a lot of work. The wall-to-wall carpeting spanned the living and dining rooms, decorated with insolent stains and holes. The bedroom and bathroom to the side seemed limp, like paralyzed limbs dangling from their sockets.

I am still uneasy in my pretense. I am supposed to be an artist. Or some sort of person versed in visual creativity. It seems my visual creativity for most of my life may have consisted mostly of imagining the circumference of a random woman’s areola. Of course, that has its merits, too. Just not for a friend’s dining room mural.

(more…)