Glitter

She feels so heavy sometimes, like this body is tied to life with a deep-sea diver's lead weights. The world looks blurred and distorted like it is viewed through the lens of a diver's helmet too. Sound, sight, touch, all blunted, in this, her life underwater. It is in these times when she needs a lift, a distraction, something to make her feel good about herself, this time especially, because the bluntedness and leaden weight of her limbs have gone on too long. The burden of living has become too cumbersome to bear. This is her night, the one she has been planning for a while, in secret. She dresses up for no one in particular. Her eyes are lined, armpits dabbed with antiperspirant, her nerves laced with anti-depressant, her breast lifted with anti-sag underwires, and her pudenda sprayed with antidesiccant. Her cheeks are bright with blush. When it is time, she dabs glitter on her lids over the eye shadow and above the mascara. Her eyes are framed by a large white flower, its petals outlined in black. The glitter helps her to remember that she is not completely of this earth, that she is made of matter, of building blocks, of discreet atoms bound together in electrical lust and love into molecules, and that those molecules somehow agree to form a system, powered by what she has no idea, but that runs on particles derived from fusion, from clusters of stars collapsing in on themselves, their heavy mass imploding in a great inferno and orgy of bonding. Will she find what is missing up there, in the Cosmos, when this life ends she wonders. She hopes she looks good lying in state, glitter still in place. She blinks at the mirror and smiles. It feels good getting this close to it all being over or just beginning. She doesn't know for sure. It's when she gets this close that the pain goes away, that life rises up to take a stand. She walks a knife edge to join the procession that invokes all souls on a November stroll. She honors those long gone and those who will depart soon enough. Electricity tingles in her beating heart, her dancing bones, hers for now. She shines.