Ebb
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

Danielle (artmouse) showed me this poem yesterday, at about 2AM. It's stuck in my head since, which, although not a lot of time, is enough for me to want to do this task.


I still don't have the hang of HTML, so the pictures will be...in the pictures.

What happened was, I blinded myself by taking an old hoodie from forth grade an wearing it backwards, also in the pictures. (that...oddly still kind of fits. I think I'm just maybe too thin.) Then I sat down and decieded to doodle a picture whilest having my computer recite Ebb over and over again by pressing a couple of buttons about once every 25 seconds. Then, I took off my blindfold and looked at the drawing I'd made with fountain pens and a couple of ball points that I'd found in my desk. So I used my usual skill and method of creation: Writing.

This is what I came up with in 20 or so odd minutes of writing:

The world was outside. The world felt cold, it was summer, but it was winter. It was July. It was June. It was every month of every day of every year that I had come to this place for hours in the night. It's open for 24 hours, except for Christmas. Nothing is open on Christmas. The counter feels hollow. It feels like an embankment built to hold my coffee, but if I lean on it too hard I'll fall through. It feels like Papier-mâché.

It's morning. It's night.

The shot of whiskey that the man next to me has forgotten to drink is evaporating. He focused on his food. It evaporates inward. It dries inward. It runs away. The woman who runs the "25 Hour Diner" as they call it pours me another cup of coffee. She mutters something. I ask her "What?" She mutters again. I give up.

Nothing happens for a long, long time. I drink coffee. I read the paper. There's war and death, and cut fiber optic cables that took thousands of peoples phone systems offline. The coffee is warm but not as warm as that past. It still feels like the winter will come into the summer. It feels like a thousand haiku dealing with simplicity. It feels like a bad movie from the fifties. The counter is nearly all full. People need places like this. These are places where you can feel like you're socializing.

There's a seat next to me. It's a decrepit seat. It's a seat that has seen better days. All of these seats have seen better days. The plastic leather has cracked and torn. It has become something that it wasn't in the beginning. It has stopped being a swanky accessory. Another coffee is absorbed down. The whiskey shot has evaporated fully now. This might have been a second shot, or a third.

A woman from outside walks through the diners double doors after driving up to parking lot. She's had a long journey. She sits on the decrepit seat. I finish some coffee.

"Hi" I say.
"What?" she says.
"I don't know." I say.