Kaylee Walton
Entropy, or the Art of Losing Things Gently
I was drunk for a week straight. No one said a thing.
Not when the tequila lingered on my teeth, sour and stale, like the ghost of a kiss I didn’t want. Not when I folded into myself at some dimly lit party, collapsing into a stranger’s sheets, into a stranger’s arms, into mornings that taste like regret and cigarettes. Not when I walked home at 4 AM, the streets empty with a silence so familiar it hummed. Not when I was shrinking in front of your eyes.
Time curdled. Fruit sagged into syrup in the wooden bowl. Milk thickened in my fridge. My phone buzzed with the weight of unread pleas, but I let them sit, let them rot, like everything else.
A stranger stared at me in the mirror, hollow-eyed, skin stretched too tight over a skeleton that ached for something it couldn’t name. I looked down at my hands. I traced the creases of my palms with my cracked fingertips.
I want to go home.
But home was the light that fell through your kitchen window at dusk, years ago.
When the world was still soft at the edges.
Kaylee Walton writes with a hand on the pulse of grief, mental illness, and the human experience- tracing shadows, small mercies, and what it means to survive. When they are not writing, they can be found postcard hunting or curled up in the weight of warm cats. Their work has also appeared in Sundog Literary Magazine. Dwell with them on Instagram @penspastepaper.