work in progress

I posted this a couple of years ago. It's gone through some revision - nothing as substantial as I'd like - but I've been trying to write a tiny bit more again lately, so this is what I've been working on. It still kind of sucks - it's overwrought and too wordy and has some other problems as well. But I'm working on it. So here it is:

She sits perched on the corner of her bed, looking out the window, hair in her eyes. She hasn’t showered today. It seems much too pointless to bother with when it’s so hard to even get herself dressed in the morning. She's too tired to bother brushing the hair away as it drifts across her forehead and down into her eyes - or maybe she just doesn't notice anymore - so instead she keeps her arms folded across her as though they can keep her thoughts from exploding out of her chest, through her lungs, and into her voice. As long as they stay buried, perhaps they aren't real.

Cold as she is, the uncried tears build and build behind her eyes and burn around her heart until her chest, aching, heaves with strangled sobs. But she refuses to let the tears fall because she is uncertain that she would be able to stop them and she doesn’t want to wake her roommate or the neighbors.

But her hands are ice cold. The draft sliding under the loosely locked window envelops and shrouds her and she thinks about reaching for a blanket before shivering and wrapping her arms around herself more tightly, trying to cradle her entire body in those long arms.

She hasn't slept in days now, at least not really, and it's starting to show. The slivers of darkness growing under her eyes reflect the growing darkness in her mind, thoughts swimming through her mind trying to cover the occasional restfulness. She has snatched an hour of sleep here and there, each time praying her exhausted mind and body will be allowed to sink into oblivion for at least a few hours, but the wakefulness, unwanted, always comes calling.

It's four a.m. and she's still looking out the window. Her roommate wakes up and asks what she's doing, mumbles in annoyance, "you have a final in the morning and so do I so go to sleep." But she doesn't understand that sleep isn't something that can be commanded, it's something that will only come uninvited.

She presses her face against the frosty-edged window, miniature lacy pieces of ice outlining the antique wood. She stifles a laugh, almost hysterical, as she remembers how miraculous and beautiful she once thought snow could be – now it seems the height of absurdity, to remember the sense of wonder and aliveness that she hasn’t now felt for the last week. She strains her eyes, desperate to see the stars that are blotted out by the dim orangeness of the city lights, craning her head upward so long that her neck becomes stiff and knotted with anxiety about the vanished stars. What if the stars are like her thoughts, and not seeing them makes them untrue?

Suddenly she's crying and she can't feel them slipping down her face like rain down a windowpane, but they course down her face and drip onto the bedspread. Her roommate sits up again and asks what's wrong? But she can't speak for the longest time and when the girl in the bottom bunk falls asleep again she thinks to herself that maybe the stars aren't gone, maybe she just can't see them anymore.