In-Between Alphabet: A is for Anyways

Anyways leads in front or else it runs behind. It’s derisive, dead-pan, dominating, and dismissive and when you’ve practically had it figured out, it changes course or doubles back. It’s a reminder of a foregone choice. Or a choice of where to go.

"Anyways," she says and he braces himself, because he knows that the conversation can go any way. It’s most likely a way he refuses to contemplate, down the rabbit hole, falling and falling and ending up somewhere that’s a mirror image of everything he understands. "Anyways," and then she’s off, flitting and tripping and switching, flight or fight reflexes tensing his muscles, his mind scrambling to extract a kernel of sense of the tumbling words striking him in pinprick raindrops. An idea forms hazy in his cupped hands, though drips drops slip through his fingers still. He lifts it, carefully, tenderly, to sip, but before his lips can touch, she splashes it away with a throwaway, "Anyways," and shifts topic once again.