Plastic

I’m walking through another crowded room wondering if people can sense the tremors behind my eyes. Fluttering wings of falling Angels full of hellfire buckshot. I’m seeping into the Berber carpet, into the taut stitching and beginning to gasp as it wraps its threads around my chest. My vision is beginning to blur. The room has forgotten me and began its own path into the ether. I take a knee at an end table by the entrance, holding up plastic flowers and now a man whose rushing mind is quietly questioning if he is any more or less real than the aesthetic artificiality he has no name for. Some man in a factory could have very well made up his own species of flower. It may have never been real. Is that Art? My shoulders dip as the carpet pulls me deeper. And my fingers feel the dusty cool of the vase that reminds me of an urn. The kind that someone is placed in by a family that could afford to buy one, but didn’t bother to put much thought into it- because he is, and always has been more of an obligation than a member of their genus. An old man puts his hand on my shoulder. The flowers fall to the floor. “Are you okay, Son?” As my shaking hands desperately tuck the waiting room’s color back into place, I tell him I am fine. Carefully adjusting each flower back the way it was. When his eyes met mine, I knew that someone had indeed felt the quake. He knew. “Are you sure you’re okay?” “Yes, sir. It’s just one of those days.” I told him. “We all have those, Son. Don’t worry.” I tried not to look up again. But, as my eyes met his once more. I know he knew the truth. Not everyone. Not like this. Just the ones who live in the corners of rooms full of people. Full of colors that no one appreciates, because they know it’s not real. Just a cheap decoration taking up space until something better suited is found to fulfill its station. I am the plastic man in the corner of the waiting room. Slowly becoming unclean. Unable to wilt. Despite my need to disappear. -James Kelley 2018