during the early hours, when he is still asleep, she starts to count the small black and white tiles plastered to the ceiling of their flat. some are coated with a layer of dust, some are chipped, and some are actually not tiles to begin with, but rather disguised cockroaches. by 139 he has stretched his arms and kissed her cheek, by 208 he has tied his shoes and lit a cigarette, and by 265 he`s always gone. she knows that the smell of coffee will dissipate by 331 and that if she can bother getting out of bed to call her worried mom for once, or even just go to the damn bathroom, he will be back by 2238.

if she counts slowly.

.

sometimes, during the night, when she has named all of the constellations she knows without the familiar sound of his second-hand car pulling into their garage, she likes to sit and wonder, with a bottle of liquor, where she went wrong. she questions if by living here with him, she's wasting away the best years of her life, years she could have spent at college in order to get a successful job and buy a marvelous house, a real house that does not consist of tiled celings. this is always the farthest she gets with her musings, because she usually starts crying, or sometimes she simply passes out on the stain-resistant carpeting, only to be awakened in their bed the next day.

"when are you going to take up writing again?" he asked her once as she examined the ivory sheets, a beer bottle in her right hand.

"when are you going to stop being such an asshole?" she replied coldly, and the house was silent for 76 tiles. that midnight, she slept facing the wall, and he never brought this subject up again.

this girl is nineteen years old.

.

"every black tile is a reason why i love him. every white tile is a reason we will never end up happily ever after."

she writes this on the back of a napkin with a cheap, blue ballpoint pen and tapes it to the wall where she can see it. afterwards, she watches a documentary on the milky way, because contemplating revolving balls of gaseous heat and the infinitesimal reaches of frigid space makes her own problems seem so tiny and insignificant.

she wants to make a great escape into the galaxy she is watching on the discovery channel. her own planet`s gravity is pulling at the bangs just beneath her eyes, and her hands and feet feel heavier than normal, so that every movement requires a bit of effort. she is a statue. a marble girl.

she decides that she will simply never move again, and the napkin flutters and twirls in a non-existent breeze, mocking her.

.

when he presses her up against the clean white walls and kisses her like he never plans on stopping, she thinks earth might actually be kindasorta okay.

.

-taped to the fridge-

2,669 - B
2,668 - W

.

it is at midnight when he is moving his thumbs over that secret dip within her clavicle that he is most contemplative.

"do you love me?" he asks, his mouth muffled against the skin of her neck.

she runs her fingers against his forearm and wonders about the galaxy - or soul contact - that may or may not exist between them.

"there are 5,337 tiles," she answers him, "and 2,669 of them are the color black."

"i know." he rolls them both over so that he is beneath her and she is unable to see the tiled ceiling or the comets before pulling her down to whisper in her ear.

"sometimes i count them."

On dirait que mes plans ne se réalisent jamais, même les plus petits. Toute la semaine, j'avais planifié que samedi, j'étudirais pour l'examen d'histoire et je ferais mon travail sur le texte de français et que dimanche, j'irais chez Marianne pour faire le projet de Science. J'ai fini par aller voir un film samedi et rentrer chez nous à 11h30, et c'est aujourd'hui que je vais faire mon étude et mon travail de français. En plus, hier, j'ai mangé plein de malbouffe. Je me sens vraiment mal parce que ma peau va mourrir. J'arrêtte pas de reessayer d'avoir une belle peau, mais je succombe toujours à la tentation. Maintenant, je vais définitivement le faire, croyez-moi. La preuve que je dis ça à tout le monde est dans cet article. (Ahah, ça sonne tellement intense.)