Olive is sad on a normal day. "Leave me alone," she says to the people passing by, and they just look the other way. They weren't bothering her in the first place. Olive just has 3 sad notes playing in her head at once. Some minor chord she can't identify but she identifies with. She bows her head and smiles. It's not a happy smile but who's watching?
Olive doesn't live underground but she feels like she does. She digs herself a hole deeper and deeper and deeper, a hundred miles into the ground she's shocked by the darkness. How will she ever get out? She doesn't want to be told she's beautiful, not anymore. She left that behind a couple miles up. It was getting too heavy to bear. How much deeper will she go? There's no light left here to illuminate the bones under her skin.
Olive sits by the window. It's hot outside. Even the bugs look like they're melting right out of the sky. Streaking colors. Wax, maybe. Olive is uninspired. Maybe if she changes the music something new will fly through her window?
Olive's dancing to a different tune now. Dancing is something we all do. Do we? She's alone now. Does she still dance? Does she still talk? Does she eat? Does she cry? Does she sleep? Will she die? I can only be sure she dreams. Otherwise I'm a fool. Olive is wasting her time.
Olive is swimming, but she's really somewhere else. She doesn't want to be here but she doesn't know where else to be.
Olive is pathetic, she thinks. She sits in front of a mirror for 7 hours, or 13. Time flies when she's not here. She wouldn't notice if it all passed her by, till the last drop slithered down the glass. She watches that one. Why is the end always the longest? Olive thinks she's at the end.
Olive once drank pear flavored alcohol on a too-warm day. Olive hates pears. She thinks it was worth it, but she doesn't remember. "Pears are so disgusting," Olive thinks, "I wouldn't get within 10 feet of one if i was a fruit fly starving to death locked in a cellar with only a single pear." She went out that night with a friend and didn't say a single word. She's deep in thought, they must have thought, but I'm not an omnipotent narrator. She wasn't thinking.
Olive's lost on the highway. She doesn't want to keep driving, forward till she hits a town. Olive's on the side of the desert road and she thinks she'll give up this time, but she never does. It's not strength that keeps her going. She's too weak to stop and rest her head for a thousand years until her bones fly up in some gust of desert wind that stirs the sand and with it Olive, olive, olive. Olive's dissolving now.
Olive crashed her car, she thinks. There's something going on. Olive doesn't care. Olive is listening to a police officer, thinking maybe if she changes her name she won't have a pit anymore. It's probably calcified history, she thinks, something about her parents. She just needs to get rid of them, so she doesn't call them anymore. Olive changes her name.
Olive doubts herself again. She paces around her apartment. Olive feels sick. Sick sick sick sick sick. Olive opens a notebook and writes something over and over.
Olive doesn't sleep. It's 3 am. Olive had a lover, once, Olive had a dream. Olive sees a friend she once knew, when she was small. Olive changed. The summer is cruel. She barely makes it home. Olive wants to be fragile, Olive wants to be clean, Olive kisses me never, Olive stares at the screen.
Olive misses her mother and she tries not to scream. If she wasn't so sick she'd have nothing to worship. Olive's simple, she's clean, she's swearing that it's just the heat. Olive's on Venus, Olive's on Mars.
Olive squishes a mosquito between her fingers. It was buzzing in her ear. There's blood on her fingers, Olive's blood. My blood, she thinks, picking off a scab. My blood, she thinks, rubbing the mosquito into her wound.