It is not so ordinary, she thinks, weighing the ingredients for her daily dose of consolation.
Falling asleep by a dim living room lamplight at 22.30, switching it off at 2.00, dragging my feet to my bedroom, ever so sluggishly, so that the demon breathing a heavy milky breath behind my ribs doesn’t wake.
That’s not so common.
All the temperatures changing after every three inches on my body, all the permeable cell membranes spewing colorful metallic minerals.
Not so conventional.
She looks at her cracked cuticles, wonders when she will aesthetically mature, and bites a crooked corner of her fingernail – lying to herself that she will do it this last once only to even the nail out. Lying so sharply between her teeth, saying in her head or maybe out loud that it’s the last of her distasteful pleasures.
It’s not practical at all, she confirms with a mental pat on the back.
Waking up in the morning, not from my alarm, but again from the streak of sunlight pouring in from the stupid shades that I said I’d fix around eight years ago, but never did because I simply wanted to force myself into accepting all kinds of circumstances.
She fumbles around the bed and feels for a soft creature, a furry one whose black marks against white makes him look like he’s wearing a superhero mask in the semi-darkness of her room.
She attaches her head to his and wonders how many people think they look alike. She hugs him within her arms, crosses them over him to look like an ‘X’, so that if anyone were to send a drone to hover above them, they’d mark it as a no-go zone. They’d watch them both ‘X’-ed out for a moment, they’d witness:
the simple daily solace,
somewhat too obvious,
very much like sunlight,
almost too easy to look away from.
— Beisan A. AlShafei
Beisan's Burble 