The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Mirages of Belonging
by Amanda Worthington

It gets darker before it gets lighter

Tried hard to be a lover

But momma raised a fighter

And the fraying edges of this reality

The mirages of belonging

In this desert of

“It’s always just me”

Don’t really get under my skin

For longer than one long, drawn out

Wish-I-wasn’t-here day

And I’m the fraying thing then

Afraid to begin again

Sometimes the day’s millennia

Sometimes just decades

Dark like Iceland in January

But shot through with aurora

Just more trapped energy

Just more ions colliding

Beautiful like letting go and watching

Like screaming and not dying

No one ever tells you

That that’s fighting too

Then the bout’s over

And some voice

From deep underwater where the unaffected by cosmic misery dwell

Yells something about victory

Old fashioned muddled

And am I far away

Or all the way here now?

Drowning in some poison ether

I think about drinking it down just to see

Ears ringing, I refrain

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Refrain

Refrain

Refrain

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Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay