two spheres of sugar on the table. our backs squirm in blue plastic, bright and full of holes, as if gnawed at by caterpillars the night before. we are simply residues of our older days. the laughs flash beside me: two girls, in the light in front of the ice cream shop. i am in between. our eyes look down, plunging into the sugar spreading away, the pastel orbs melting as they slide between our lungs.

the palm trees seep downwards in a silent prayer. we are at a cemetery but don’t know it—seniors in high school bite off bits of childhood. and every time i look up i get sick—not from the sweetness, but from the blueness around me. american picket fence, cerulean oceans rippling like ceramic glaze, skies swirling before green fields: this path transcribed in through tongues of past generations now interrupts the sugar sprawled across my tongue. the pink jelly bears the weight of a future i know yet do not.

i hate the sense of doom. our scene is in the middle of the cinema. before us, the wind slammed down a restaurant sign, paper napkins whizzing through the air like flies, strips of hope we watch glide to the floor. and right now: three kids hunched over nothingness. skinny limbs folded over our last bite of fakeness. i look at the cars. i look at my spoon prying chunks away from the desert in my fingers.

old men laying quiet words on the table, playing chess with their memory. i am a sickly rosebud trying to peer over the edge into the outer world. entropy blossoms like my pupil when the lights go out. someone turn off the lights. i want to taste everything at once—sweetness and whatever chemical is found in blueness.

my brother likes blue raspberry, but i don’t. i think about leaving, but want to sit in this chair. its aqua limbs dash like rivulets. i am almost out of this place. los angeles slips from my fingernails, my oil-coated flesh now hardened from the air around me. ingesting this last blur of my youth is my form of living, of taking my patience one spoon at a time. i don’t know what i’ll be in a year. i try to separate myself from the film of cobalt taut over us, but i’m always bound to it—the chair, the tremble of my fingers on the keyboard at night, the resume, application.

an unavoidable abyss. two blinds above the table—one for my friends, the next photographing this fleeting space. i hope i will figure it out. i sit in the melancholy under the blue, the chair almost embracing me. i plan on eating ice cream on the last day of every semester in college. i want to submerge myself in the ocean, eat this chair, swallow everything around me. i am a slate of blankness terrified of blue—apprehensive yet ready for it. a tsunami burbling around me when i get up to go.