BEAUTIFUL TO ME

By: Cody Weber

“and if it feels good, why do you care?” she asked behind a bowl of cereal, fingers in her unkempt hair.  Why do I care? And what is it exactly that I care about?

i smoked a cigarette and watched the sun swallow the stars outside, thin-faced and looking part charismatic and part apocalyptic, celebrities were dying all over the TV and she didn’t believe me, when I answered her.

it doesn’t matter what I said or how i said it or how i meant to say it  it only mattered, i guess, to her anyway, that I didn’t jump into unrelenting arms, as the statement seemed to be an open invitation (or a grave continuation of events that i didn’t ever know were transpiring
within me)

she told me that my problem was that i didn’t find death to be funny,  and because of that, i wasn’t anything great. she also said that irony wasn’t thick and that she didn’t understand why people said it because irony was transient and decadent and macabre and pretty.

she also hated the way the lights polluted the city, but didn’t mean driving her expensive car. Maybe irony isn’t thick, maybe she’s on to something, I don’t know.

but she started glowing and i don’t mean like, say, a pregnant woman glows. I mean, she literally starting glowing, bright red into the atmosphere, she said that life was just a separation between time and earth. and at this point, i started to believe her.

there were three blackbirds perched on the telephone wire beside the window. sometimes, i think it’s strange that i notice those things, and other times those things are all i think defines me.

it really doesn’t matter, I guess. One clouded head on to the next, i turned blue and winter. Look, I know that sounds strange when I say it, but two seasons sat beside each other, pretending to love and not quite knowing why. And that’s when I realized.

it’s cold when it is because the warmth, it rises, to sleep within the galaxy, whom it finds occasional comfort in. what the cold never knows, and maybe the galaxy doesn’t either, is that warmth is only temporary before it’s winter again, and that’s what I was.

I was winter, chasing after summer, who is ultimately self-concerned, vapid, and ugly.

and if it feels good, why do I care? Well, it doesn’t feel good anymore. So I don’t.