Red.

My hair still has red and gold streaks from last night. There’s an imperceptible but incorrigible ringing in my ears strangely like the instrumentals to The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. I can feel the sugar high linger in my blood stream, shaking off lethargy and giving me an extra spring to my step (in two hours I fully expect my head to ache from the blunder of two slices of chocolate cake and handfuls of watermelon candies, but who really knows? Maybe I will be blessed with glucose tolerance of my early childhood, just once again).

Mother is still asleep. We were both awake at two o’clock last night, talking in whispers through paper-thin walls. I had a towel under my highlighted hair and she spoke with the tired but comfortable tone of one accustomed to be continually evading sleep. I am usually too annoyed at my somniphobia to mention anything worth remembering, but frequently during the hours of daylight I will suddenly recall a snippet of one of her sentences, something garbled, spoken in English and quick silver Spanish. 

My room is a mess. There are orange and yellow ballons stranded on the floor, paintings left askew, dirty clothes stuffed rather unceremoniously in my closet. I’ll have to fix it before Mother wakes up, but for now I will wander into the linoleum kitchen and finish off Alex’s cereal. There’s something sleepy-looking to the sky today, as if it too has yet to wake up (or is choosing to delay the moment as long as possible). In this respect at least, we are one and the same.