Words that have been said

I stood by the entrance door and wore my smile for the day.

As we approached 8 o’clock a voice echoed through the store and announced that we were now open and the manager then unlocked the doors and when the doors were unlocked a stream of flesh flowed through the opening into the sanctuary of warmth we provided on that cold winter morning. I felt a wind brisk and bold blowing from outside and it clung to the corners of my lips with its icy fingertips and stretched them upward into a smile that was more pleasing to the eye.

So I stood and the people walked in and the people asked questions and I directed them to where they wanted to go and I talked to them and they talked to me and I was engulfed in an elusive shroud of happiness. Then the conversations were over and my mind went blank. My head began to ache and I felt my entrails being gnawed at by hungry gulls. Then I realized that it had been me standing beside a table and scratching my own belly so that my fingernails had torn layers of skin and there were dried clots of blood stuck to my fingertips. Then I saw my skin folding and unfolding as if beneath it a wicked worm had decided to move. It was a tale told many times before, the tale of the serpent that crawled underneath the skin, yet when the picture was held within the frame of my eyes the lack of its innovation mattered little; all I wanted to do was to scratch and scratch and scratch until the worm died! And that is what I did as I talked to people and helped them find what they were looking for.

An hour went by and I scratched to no avail.

"Goddamn it, why can't I get this thing out?! It itches like hell!"

I ran to the bathroom and looked into the mirror but thankfully my smile was still there.

The worm was still there.

I went back on the floor and saw a woman in her fifties and she needed help with finding a book and I had no reason not to lend her a helping hand so that is what I did and that is how I spent most of my morning.

Then came my lunch break. Then my mind went.....

Walls surrounded me and walls brought comfort. An irritating comfort that spoke to me in hums and whistles of my own fragile nature and of the triviality of my youth. I felt a wave of emotions pulling me under a tide and I was happy and I was sad and I cried and then I smiled and I realized that time does not heal a wound and time cares little about your wounds.

Time simply tires you out.

When you are older and your youth is gone, either to a faraway land or standing across the platform of a subway station just outside your reach, you care less and think less and you can organize your thoughts much better than a youngster ever could but a youngster is weak and a youngster is uncertain and a youngster is crippled by the beauties of life.

And the walls comforted me and talked to me. They said that not all youngsters are like that, most of them know their way and unlike you, most aren't pretentious. It is only you, you are the weakest of the bunch.

My break was over and I stepped once again onto the sales floor. "Run around and never saunter", I repeated that sentence in my head over and over again until the rhythm was broken when a girl in tight blue jeans walked into the store and I asked her if she needed help and she said no and looked away and I kept staring at her a*s and her tits and her face. Suddenly nothing mattered anymore, thoughts and politics and rhetoric and poetry and philosophy and morality mattered little, for I was the youngster crushed under the brutality of the flesh. I thought about lying in bed beside the girl and in my revery she straddled me and impaled herself and I felt her wetness as she rode me and reached her climax; it was a feeling matched by nothing else and I thought that if I could only hold on to that feeling for the rest of my life I would be fulfilled. But then I remembered the walls and what they had said about the trifles of the flesh and how one can never trust their own feelings for they are fleeting and just like all else, temptation and youth and euphoria and pain all fade into oblivion one day.

It is only the flesh and its untrustworthy nature that one carries around with them all their lives.

I stood motionless. I watched the girl's a*s as she walked out then felt s****y for objectifying her. I looked at the clock. My shift was over. I went back to the break room, drank my cold coffee and left. My face ached from smiling and my head ached yet I did not know why. I seldom knew why.

I stood outside the building and gazed into the shadow of a parked car. Soon the shadow was gone and the final slants of sunlight retreated behind the mountains.

I scratched my arms and face for they still felt a little itchy.

The worm was still there.

The worm had never left.