By: Lianna Albrizio

Every morning she arises to a routine feeling of despair. She picks up a pen to begin to write, attempting to cleanse her mind of self-deprecating thoughts that bite. She puts on a black t-shirt to match her mood, and applies mascara called “blackout” to accent her mysterious eyes through which she regularly broods. She goes to drink a cup of black coffee to experience a euphoric high, but crashes to a hampering low, as the day goes by.

She gets a cigarette to add to the blackening of her lungs.

When she arrives at school and talks to someone new, her hazel eyes become eclipsed by dilation, comparable to her first drug experimentation. After inevitable rejection, she resigns to a dark place when she feels like nobody cares. She always feels in the dark when confused about her affairs– mostly because she refuses to see the bigger picture, or perhaps is just hindered by daunting bouts of depression that cloud up her mind like a pre-storm sky in winter.

When she steps outside to view a magnificent sky, the earth is splendidly bright, but she can’t seem to relish and take flight. The sunset is breathtakingly beautiful, yet all her somber mind allows her to sight is the subsidence of light, and an array of fading colors against a horizon that she will never reach. This sense of emptiness runs deep– day-in and day-out through which she stares down the abyss in her yearning heart that pleads, “let me out!”

When night falls into a starry evening and she falls back asleep, she closes her eyes and still can’t see. Black is dismal like me.

Story Tags: contest entry || Dour Girl || Lianna Albrizio || poem || poetry || self-reflection