The snow sat cold against her wet boots.
Her face remained down turned
near the glowing pub.
She was all done.
finished.
She had nothing left
that was of any worth to anyone else.
She was now a horned demon, angry enough to
melt the white snow at her feet.

Everyone kept trying to subdue her
and she was still determined to halt their attempts,
to avoid change
for them.

A hot tear fell to the ground at her feet,
and she stepped forward towards the
royal wooden door.

She reached out to grab the cold, golden handle
which gripped her for one terrifying second,
holding her like it did all of the men who enter the bar.
The light in the smoky bar was nonexistent,
a figment of all other's imagination.

She knew better than to see it
when it was not there.

The bar was filled with huge smoky men,
laughing and yelling with each other,
drunkenly seeing parts of their lives that
were forced upon them.

There was nothing left
without the parts of them that had died
except stereotypes,
but no one else could see it,
as they were all too ordinary.
There was no soft white light left
to feel,
warm on her pale face
that was given by her beautiful mind,
as it was demolished by the ordinary.

The old man, resting and cursing,
the sun, shining youth’s horrid rays,
they faced her.
And at their gaze, she cried smoke, black steam.
It was them,
the universe
that stole her,
wronged her,
so she wanted to avoid being like the beings in it.
This, however, was getting harder.

She sat on the punctured seat
and eyed the other bar goers,
all of them had two straws in their Cokes.
They all drink Diet.

The bar tender, made of smoke and dust,
came to her and asked her what she wanted.
And she lied to him,
like she did all of the other bar tenders of the world:
she ordered a coke.

The men stared at her.
“Diet” was her amendment.

The men turned back
to sip at their Diet Cokes.

The cold glass landed next to her, but
she didn’t stay long enough
to sip the bitter neutrality.

As soon as she escaped,
she yelled at the emptiness,
piercing the cold night air.

Then she saw a star
and it caressed her in the
deep night,
allowing her to forget her arguments and her faults.
She watched her despair begin to melt away
like the snow.

She walked back in calmly,
lacking any choice at all
And sipped the Diet Coke.
Trying to remember who she was.

She was losing it,
But she couldn’t remember why it mattered.

The brown, bubbly liquid now tasted less bitter.
The gross after taste faded into
A memory,
A legend,
A myth,
and then was winked out of existence
like an old dream and was
replaced nicely with simple
Diet Coke.

The snow fell.
She stopped melting it.
The light in the bar
brightened to
a whole whopping watt.
The light rushed into her eyes.
The smell of burning candles came in
and comforted her.

Everyone now exists,
But she doesn’t.

She is all done.

She sipped her sweet Diet,
identically to everyone else.