Now and then @ 59 degrees.

I'm the girl who sits on her fire escape, alone, listening to YES and Jimmi Hendrix, chain smoking, and drinking wine, while watching her neighbors put on their finest backwards baseball hats, and throw a backyard party. They snap their overly-posed group photos which they'll post on their facebook later on the same evening, and this little thing called loneliness will try and eat away at me from somewhere deep inside of my gut.

I crawl back through the window I came out of and change the radio station. I wonder why all the stations play commercials at the same time. I change the music to the least offensive song, which happens to be "Fire" by the Ohio Players, and I dance around in my living room like I'm on stage with a full audience and a full band backing me up. My hair is flying around the way hair only flies around in a Pat Benetar video and the smile that appears on my face is the only real one that's seeped through this facetious mask I wear all day. In this moment, I feel happy, beautiful, and free. I don't remember, not even for a second, that just an hour earlier I was crying into my hands for reasons unbeknownst to me, thinking of jumping off that fire escape, but too afraid that the pain I was feeling would then be inflicted upon those I love. This is now. Where are the people I love?