Notes from Persephone

There's a certain stillness in the crux of 2am that is challenged only by footsteps and bicycles. The cars fade away and the lights fade away and the voices fade away and the little girl sits down on a bench to pick mudbits off her shoe. She'd been avoiding herself, losing her Chopin to Ludacris and her Stevens to Bukowski and with the latter she sank beneath the rivers of manipulation.

I want to do what's right, Demeter, so I'll stop before the 6 seeds turn to 12 and spare you an eternal winter.

She made the calls. The ones to the doctors. The pain's been too much these days. She spends her evenings in bed and calls it apathy, because apathy is something no one questions in New York.

There's a brimming notebook by her bed. She writes. She can't talk.
If she opens her mouth she knows that in their listening there is back-thought and in their hearing there is judgment and in their caring there is selfishness and she's running out of minutes.

It's why she sleeps with men. To make sure she's still alive.

It's why she showers in scalding water. To get jolted into being.

It's why she loves every passing person that ticks away like the hands on a backwards clock. If they are here, so is she.

Eurydice loved Orpheus less than she loved the darkness.
Persephone loves straddling the two.