| I looked up at you, the sweat in your hair and the sweat on the side of your face. You had a dirty smile on your mouth. You think you're so great? Believe me sweetheart, I've had better. I looked up at the ceiling, ignoring you, ignoring your breath on my neck. I rolled my eyes and checked the cuticles of my nails. So many times have I been in this position, with my view of the ceiling. So many different ceilings and I've lost my goal in life. I wanted to be a doctor. But here I am trying not to be repulsed to the point of vomiting by your small dick. I guess that's why you drove up in a fancy car. There'll be so many like you after your gone... The ceiling looked down at me, the shadow people created by the curtains laughing at me. Their mouths wide open and their eyes tightly closed in humor. The same shadow people that have followed me to every ceiling that I have ever seen. And there have been so many. The first was the pale green of my childhood home, the light cover dirty with dust and the bodies or poor, unfortunate bugs. Trying to go into the light was apparently suicide. I remember looking up at the peeling paint from the rough carpet of my floor, trying to ignore the screaming and yelling and then the pain below my waist when my father wanted to forget "that dirty slut of a mother." And they say parents can't be entirely to blame for your fuck ups. The second was the ceiling of my "best" friend, really the one who slipped me Vicodin under the school desks in class and let me sleep over when I was too high or too fucked over to make it home. It was a high, beige ceiling. With two peaks and artwork pinned all over it, no beige peeking through. The ceiling I saw during my hangovers and crashing downs. The ceiling I saw when he went down on my while I was dozing to Xanax. Who doesn't need a friend who'll do anything and everything with you? The first time. The ceiling of a polished classroom. Gray speckled tiles with thick gray lines to separate them into even blocks so they wouldn't become a sea of dots and artistic splatters. I remember the uneven leg of the laboratory table as my biology teacher fucked me to a passing grade. I regretted for a few second not being able to be a virgin when I got married, but when I felt those fat, little fingers pinch my nipples I realized how silly I am. Teacher really can't be trusted. My first apartment at the age of seventeen, rooming with a drug addict who liked to make balloon animals out of condoms and hand them out in the parking lot of the mall. There was a yellow spot above the couch that I called my bed. She had poked a hole in it when it had filled with water from the leaky shower in the apartment above. I remember late night listening to her turn tricks for rent, the hole a dark black eye. She would come to talk after they had left and would light up one of the fancy cigarettes she bought (she said they gave her more style and class). The smoke would rise from her mouth and settle near the hole as she told that there was no shame in sucking dick for money. She was a better teacher than any that I'd ever had in high school. The cheap motel, the ceiling neon red from the Vacancy sign and then blue from the sign with the motel's name. The first trick, the demand for the rent payment in the back pocket of my jeans on the floor. The hair in my face and the man pushing my legs over his shoulders. Fat skin and stinking sweat and the ceiling changed colors with every blink of the two signs. I felt the bodies of all the others who had been here as well, the wives cheating on their husbands, the young children earning a living, the kinky people trying to brighten up their sex lives with something not so standard as fucking from behind and food. I don't think turning that trick ever left me with a scar. And then there was the sterile white ceiling. The hospital ceiling that I saw for two weeks during my recovery from my overdose. It hadn't been intentional of course. Merely an accident. The sound of the heart monitor and the silence that always filled a hospital were so loud. I remember the sound of the crying on occasion and then the random wheeling of hospital beds. The ceiling was so plain, so clean, reminding me of something that I had lost a long time ago but could not place my finger on. I remembered a lot of things in my life during that time. The ceiling disappeared, the long crack across it turning into the white pillow of the bed. I put my hands into the sheets below me, curling them around the scratchy fabric and sighed as you made some stupid move behind me. So many ceilings. How many more would I go through? The End |
| The View Of Ceilings by: V |