Phase of the Fridays

Today was Friday, it was one unending chaos in my mind. I spent the whole day thinking it was Thursday, and I don’t know why it’s such an unsettling feeling to realize you have been living the wrong day, but it is.

I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch, and have been doing that for a while. Yet I feel sicker and look worse. Is it my eyes or my body that’s changed? But it’s a game, a competition, keeping it to myself.

You sit on the floor around my bathroom door between the carpet and tile, like edging on entering. Like preparing to escape when needed. I am putting on layers and layers of different obnoxious lipstick shades, because I own them and never wear them.

You tell me all the things I “must be feeling” in your condescending tone. when I answer with silence, you change strategies. “Well I can’t read your mind. Communicate”.

this feels like a bad dream, like I am being fed lines, and there is nothing else to say. Like I already know what happens and have to let it play out. So I say what I do every Friday to you.

“I am just making it through the day the best that I can.”

The lipsticks are bleeding into each other. I like to think this is a once in a lifetime color combination on my lips right now. I could be kissing someone and pressing this unique shade along their cheeks.

You are pulling open my drawer of pills. “What the hell. It’s like you’re a pill bottle hoarder. These are all empty, why?”

I look into my own eyes in the mirror. She doesn’t look real. What is our next line?

“Oh, I am keeping track of all the meds I‘ve taken. the dates are on the bottles. It’s just helpful for organizing.”

You don’t need to know that they are collecting in that drawer until I can string them on a rope and hang them like decor. It’ll make a real statement: “I’m in pain!”

You shut the drawer making a tsk sound with your mouth. And you run a finger across the surface of my baseboards. I hate when you do that, as if the dust is testament of my failure. in the mirror I give myself a resolute nod, and remind myself I am not a homemaker. I am not my mother. I don’t need to clean my baseboards. But the reminders aren’t helping.

As I am rolling the tubes of lipstick back in color order, I can feel you behind me standing up. Walking around my apartment to observe things. My dusty books, the half-written journals jotted with angry handwriting, empty crusted-over bottles. These socks I have worn for three days, the holes stretching in them. Me.

We are all under your scrutiny.

I feel like a slimy specimen between two panes of glass, under a microscope. I feel like a germ or a mold, something you watch with disgusted fascination as it rots. You make me feel this way, and you do it every Friday.

When I watch my smeared mouth in the mirror, I wonder if it will open of its own accord and tell you how much I hate Fridays and you. Your eyes are lingering behind my shoulder still, waiting for the first mistake to be uttered. But if I speak or remain silent, I’m already in the wrong. I have already failed you with my existence.

I'm not asking you to save me, but maybe just turn your eyes away.