Summer Burns

                It’s a semi-cloudy, semi-blue, average temperature Saturday and she’s stuck between deciding if she’s feeling lonely or if she feels just bored. She’s been lounging on the pale cream couch for the past few minutes, and before that she had been trying (and failing) to cook something that would be relatively delicious by her standards (and she always ends up feeling so miserable when she hates the final product anyways), and before that she had been taking a shower, because she simply had nothing else to do. 

She may or may not have skipped lunch, because the cooking had taken such a long time. And she may or may not have burned her finger (yet again), but she lied to the empty air saying it wasn’t anything serious, and didn’t even bother running cold water over that finger. The cold could barely be felt anyways, so why bother, right?

It’s been the same sort of pattern ever since summer strolled into town, with all its flashy, burning, searing golden glory. Groggily get up to turn off the alarm clock, lay there with no purpose or meaning for another half hour, get up, go to school, sit through yet another boring, monotonous lecture for several hours, go home, eat crap (she really needs to stop eating so much junk food), feel empty again, get up, cook, burn another finger (she would run out of space soon), ignore said burn, finish whatever work had to be finished, stay up staring at useless newsfeeds and unresponsive chat boxes, stay up till the sun was back to greet her again, sleep for a few hours, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

By this point in her thoughtless rambling, her finger is beginning to throb a bit, so she absentmindedly rubs the skin around the burn a bit. It distracts the pain. She supposes that everything else was the same way too. She stopped feeling anything, just like the cold water stopped working. She cooked, burned, hated, to get a distraction. But what was the actual problem? She no longer knew.

She never truly knew in the first place.

She got up and trudged to the bathroom, walking forwards even when she actually couldn’t see anything, seeing as her vision was all black and white and silver and all the colors mankind could never and will never be able to describe from getting up too quickly. When she gets there, she really doesn’t know what she came here for, so she just turns on the faucet to the coldest degree, and sticks her stinging finger under the water, and stares at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair is the same as usual, or maybe worse (it was always so dull and flat). Turning off the flow of water, she turned back and flopped back down onto the couch. Almost out of reflex (or maybe it was a pathetic addiction), she grabbed her phone, which had been tossed onto the nearby coffee table, and swiftly unlocked it with one hand. No new messages.

Well that was expected.

She really didn’t know why she checked it anymore. 

She couldn’t leave it on silent, for she would find herself constantly checking it, even though she knew, she knew all too well, that no one was looking for her, no one needed to talk to her (no, not even a best friend, significant other, acquaintance), but she still found herself looking.

So, she kept it on the highest volume, so that it would ring (like that would happen though) if anyone was trying to talk to her. But even with that knowledge she still checked, and re-checked, almost like the phone was the portal to her life-line and she had to make sure she wasn’t dead.

Tossing the phone carelessly back onto the table, she stared up at the blank ceiling (blank, all blank, just like her feelings, or, actually, her feelings were even more blank than that), and ignored the burns all pinching at her skin, as if trying to painfully remind her that she was still human after all.

And such was a day in the life of the lonely. (Or bored. She still didn’t know.)