PERKED NIPPLE ON A BREAST (THAT’S ACTUALLY A HILL)

On Monday, the sun penetrated my walls the way the best lovers tend to; gently, like piercing thread through a needle, then all at once. The sort that drives even the most devoted to perdition and sends you screaming the lord’s name in vain the entire ride, and you are there, where you are meant to be, and I am here, somewhere in exile, too. At least of another sort; my own sort. 

I found a hill to sit upon and smoked a joint that had been flattened upon arrival. I spread my limbs like a star and watched over the chest of the field before me. Shards of grass swish and sway like fish in a shoal, the light pouring through the clefts. And oh my, how the bluebells have blossomed finely this spring. I really ought to think more optimistically. 

There are children smoking vapes, sharing sex tips as they play tennis with a Lost Mary and I worry about the future. Children’s lungs must be terrible these days, though in saying that I offer myself to hypocrisy. See, I inhaled enough second-hand smoke by the age of seven to justify smoking a cigarette out of my window at sixteen, but one turns into two turns into, I-now-have-an-established- routine-where-I-steal-my-mother’s-cigarettes-and-smoke-them-out-the-window-every-night. 

Oh my, am I growing old?! Do I call time of death on my youth? I should stop judging immediately - after all, I am no better, and isn’t it a rite of passage to be a little stupid when you’re young? Like how it is a rite of passage to complain about the young at my ripe age of twenty. Undoubtedly, anyone reading this who was alive for Princess Diana's Revenge Dress (yes, I am capitalising for the sake of emphasising how much of an EVENT that truly was) will laugh at my inability to recognize my own youth, but let me ponder for just a little longer.

Upon the breast of the hill, I sat like a perked nipple. Happy to exist. Probably pissing someone off somewhere.