you fell for the ordinary — Mariya Williams
i.
Your plump chocolate body is melting like syrup in his rough brown sugar hands. The bed sheets are musky and yellow like the streetlight outside his apartment showing its face through the old dingy lace curtains resting on his bedroom window. His long dreads tap tiny melodies on your damp face as he shifts on top of you. He doesn’t close his eyes as he migrates into you; he just stares at the wetness of your curly lashes and matted afro as you quiver. You tilt your head back slightly and imagine that this is what making love looks like; that this intimacy doesn’t feel like a game. You don’t close your eyes either; you just stare at his cheap black bedframe, your eyes as wet as your body, and let the dusky weed-scented room swirl into an illusion as he continues to bash himself into you with every stroke.
ii.
He’s finally finished. The game is finally over. He lays right next to you as he pants softly, his hand on your thigh. You hold your stomach to steady your breathing; to feel the emptiness of your limbs. Every time this happens, you feel as if you're dissipating; as if your body is chipping away like dust, and he’s the reason why.
He steadies his breath as he pushes himself up, puts on his socks, drawers, and baggy jeans that were laying on his dark wooden floor, and heads to his slim closet. Where you goin’? You ask softly as you sit up in his bed, holding your breasts up and covering them with the old white cover that was splayed across your legs. He slightly turns to look at you with a straight face—his Pierce The Veil Selfish Machines graphic t-shirt resting in his right hand, the light from the window displaying itself in a streak across his muscular body—and says nothing. You frown at his silence towards you. He must’ve thought your frown was cute, because he began to smile like he did when he first met you, first let you into his arms and on top of his body. He walked up to you and whispered in your ear, It’s a surprise, kissed your cheek, and left the room; left your naked body to lay in his bed desolate.
iii.
Croissants? You stare into the greasy paper bag of French pastries from La Boulangerie & Co. resting on the stained marble countertop next to last night’s Chinese takeout. Surprise! He exclaims, his cheeks slightly lifting towards the dingy kitchen light, his stubble twinkling in its glow. Hope you like ‘em. Then and there, it hits you that he deserted you in those musty sheets, letting you drown in the stench of the undesirable sex you just had, confirming every thought in your mind that you are nothing but a toy to him and you’re dissipating because of that, to gift you with a bag of greasy croissants. You close the mouth of the stained contraption and try to smile, but you end up looking like a dead fish—your lips reminiscent of an old Raggedy Ann doll—turn around, and plainly say Thanks, I will.
You hate croissants. When you were in fifth grade, your father used to get them for you before taking you to school in LA. But that’s when they were good; that’s when your father was alive. They were filled with a cloudy whipped cream and tangy bleeding strawberries that shot your tongue when you bit into them, and topped off with powdered sugar. Your father was just like them: sweet, sophisticated, and hilarious. He used to blast the radio as you chomped into the delicacy in the backseat of his Cream of Wheat colored Beetle, your head bopping and your feet kicking to the beat. He used to laugh when he looked back at you dancing with a face covered in powdered sugar. He used to squeeze your cheeks and say Buh-bye pooh bear! and then unbuckle you from your tiny pink carseat to walk you to the front of your school’s large brick building. But ever since he took his life and you moved to Chicago with your mom, the soft pastry transformed into empty stale bricks that pinch your intestines when you swallow them.
iv.
The first time he entered your body, you were under the influence. You were at a club your friend invited you to, your black sparkled dress sticking onto your thighs like parchment paper. You noticed his face in the thick cloud of smoke the building was filled with; he saw your body in the same strange wave. The same-old-same-old happened: he came up to you, non-chalant and charming, hexed you into his presence, cursed you into undergoing kalopsia, bought you a drink, lit your blunt, led you to his car, and inserted your body.
The second time he entered your body, you were inhuman. You were more than drunk; you were caliginous. You were callow. It was the tenth anniversary of your father’s death, and you were trying to take yourself out the same way he did: through the glutting of over-the-counter drugs and cheap alcohol. You wanted to feel what he must’ve felt when he decided that living was inadequate for him that day to make sense of why he chose to abandon you in such a way; to make sense of all those days where life felt good with him, and how he made every moment with you feel special, like he lived for you; to make sense of why your father would kill himself even though your mom said you had nothing to do with it, and that people tend to ease their suffering in different ways, and that just so happened to be his way; to make sense of his suffering. Your body laid limp on your cold wooden apartment floor as you called him on the phone, your voice distorted with tears and vodka. Your world spiraled into a solar eclipse of bricks from the apartment’s rusted wall turning into spheres, burning lights from your various pumpkin spice and warm vanilla candles turning into puddles of water, and the splotched image of his body bursting through your black door, retrieving you from the ground, throwing you into the backseat of his car, carrying you to his bathroom to throw up, laying you on his couch to cry with you, and crashing into you to warm your frigid body.
The third time he entered your body, you were bored, and he was just as high and alone as you were.
This time, you don’t understand what led you here. Maybe you don’t need to.
v.
You stare at his eyes as he comes closer to you, his right hand grazing your face softly. You watch his eyelashes glisten in the damp kitchen light like tiny constellations, his pupils widen like two moons, and his irises shimmer like polished wood. You see a warmth in them that you haven’t seen since your father’s death and you close your eyes to capture it: the warmth of someone trying to love you. It may be a small flame, but it’s more than enough to make you smile and let him kiss you, pick you up, and place you on the counter. You let him run his fingers through your hair and in your shirt. You let him feel your body because you know there isn’t much else for him to feel. But you latch onto his lips, trying hard to bask in this profound acceptance that he’s doing all he can to love you, just like your father did all he could to stay alive for you.
Mariya Williams is a Black writer, musician, and singer/songwriter born and raised in Missouri. As a junior in high school, she currently studies creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and her poetry can be found in UMBRA. She is also the semi-finalist for the 2025 Patty Friedmann High School Writing Competition, and was awarded a Silver Key from the Scholastic Young Art and Writing Competition. She loves playing guitar, sketching, binge watching anime, and playing with her crazy siblings.