i looked at the eclipse on april 8, 2024 with my raw eyes. i forgot i’d ever been told otherwise. in 2017, my friend harry and i drove to charleston, sc to get in the path of totality. i woke up very early in the morning, in deep pain. i ran to the bath in the dark, left my head on the ledge, and felt the blood plume. i got my period only a couple hours before harry was coming to pick me up. he wanted chick fil a, i wanted to look out the window. i’d had a crush on harry, he wanted nothing to do with me. he’d come to my house, we’d smoke cigarettes on the porch and he’d tell me about this girl from home. she always put his hand on his shoulder, she always smelled like coconut, she didn’t smoke. he felt like a piece of shit around her. while we were sitting there, sharing cigarettes, i realized he saw me as the same breed as him—filthy. we were not going to be lovers. when the eclipse was over, we drove back to the apartment his sister’s friends lived at. i stayed on the porch. he brought us two beers and immediately started freaking out. he, too, had looked at the eclipse with his eyes and now he thought he was going blind. i don’t know who paranoia belongs to, what mythological function paranoia performs. i have had extreme bouts of paranoia in some of my most unhealed & unwell states, so i am sympathetic to the psychic attack, but i do, ultimately, find the behavior repulsive. it gives me the ick. he led us to his edge. we were together in the experience, and then he peeled out. he opted for more singular confines. where he was going to develop solar retinopathy and not hang out with me.
© 2024 Strawberry Oyster
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