GLITTER

        “You are beautiful,” you say to the mirror, tracing an arc of Pink Moonbeams around your right eye. “You are strong, and bright, and complete. No one can escape your gleam.”
        They will see. You wrap your left eye in a color called Champagne.
        Now you can go out. That last dab of rainbow-emitting microplastics finished your look.
        You meet your friends at the club to toss your pent up desperation to the weekend; you pour your lungs out over the incessantly pounding bass and feel, for a few fluttering moments, immortal.
        And then you’re home. You wipe away the amalgamation of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate flakes smeared on your face, and cry.
        You cry because the night had to end, because your friends had to go back to their severed lives, because you are alone, and no amount of pulsing, unthinking, club-shaking oneness can repair this singular rift in your soul. You had a chance to transcend, for real, and you failed.
        Not so for your glitter. Your glitter transcends, for glitter knows only survival. Before you can wipe them into the sink, a thousand flakes leap off your face and abscond into your carpet, where they await a brighter day, hiding among the dust particles like clowns in a crowd of bureaucrats. Here, they’ll be safe. It will be months before they have to relocate to the dark cavern of the vacuum’s bag. As for their kin, the ones washed off your face and into the sink, the journey is just beginning.
        Through labyrinths of pipes on rafts made of hair and sludge, they drift like wandering flower children, emitting their rainbows to spite the gloom. Many are separated from the pack; some, from the very flakes they shared a sheet with at printing, before they met the magnificent eye of the embosser, and before they were cut.
        But all pipes lead to the sea. And eventually, some fine day, all of your glitter will be reunited in a single body. The body of Earth’s waters.
        When that day comes you’ll be dead. On the day of your funeral, your Pink Gold and Champagne glitter bobs silently in the Caribbean, before catching a ride on the cheek of an ostentatious tuna heading for the Atlantic, where it’s hooked by a fisherman who releases it due to toxic-looking markings on its face; a shark eats the tuna, so the glitter hides in the shark’s U-shaped stomach for 21 years, clinging to the lining unscathed while pepsin and hydrochloric acid dissolve hundreds of fish skeletons and one human tibia, until at last the shark dies of old age and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it’s feasted on by lobsters and benthic fish, leaving an opening for the glitter to slip out of the half-eaten shark stomach and ride a jet of water to the surface. For hundreds of years its sunny glint catches sailors’ eyes and reminds them of a simpler time.
        At last, after nearly a millennium in transit, your glitter comes to rest on a frail old glacier in the Arctic, lending it the glitz it lost some time ago.

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