AN – What follows is an excerpt from a short story I am working on, this piece was inspired by the song Kyiv by Oksar Schuster. 

I felt like all the air, every spark of vivacity that lit up everyone around me, was depleted in me. My bulbs had blown, and I left in a smoky glass sphere and tucked away in a draw, slid neatly back into the box for repair. I didn’t feel uncomfortable in life as such, like an apparition I could easily drift between days and months unnoticed enough. Living was not comfortable, but I was alive. The rising sense of comfortability came from under my skin, a crawling sensation that slithered across my chest like clammy hands between sheets. Almost as if, rather than skin, I had a million butterflies, no, not butterflies. Moths, the kind reduced to ash when they are crumpled. A hundred thousand moths opening and closing their wings perversely across every inch of my flesh, over my eyes, even filling my mouth.
I think my silence makes most people uneasy. Silence is far too intimate for most, too penetrating and direct. They would much rather converse in small talk, the weather, sports. Someone even once told me that my eyes were too quiet, too open and dark. In truth, my eyes are brown and slightly too small for my face, nothing particularly unordinary for the mirror. I have always liked my hands though. I like other people’s hands as well. Beautiful hands do not always belong to beautiful people though, but they’ll have a fluidity about their movement, a quality of expressiveness and life that could barely be articulated in speech. They tell the most intricate of stories in sweeping gestures and sing in taps and touches. Long thin fingers for a pianist, or the bony defined fingers of a dancer. I find hands to be more honest than humans.