Back in my high school days, you sat with me on the bus once or twice. We must have lived near enough to each other, then. That route wasn’t very long.
Quiet fellow, I can’t remember for the life of me what we talked about. Maybe nothing. Maybe we just sat in silence. I’m pretty sure you were in the same year as me. You were always so quiet, seemed so alone, you were like background scenery that no one ever noticed.
I watch her pick up handfuls of my shards from the ground at her feet, over and over while parts of me are still collapsing, turning in on themselves, tearing at their frayed edges before joining the growing heaps…
I’ve been out in the world and here at home and surely annoying everyone even as my heart dissolves into hot steam and I still question everything and I still need and I still need things I can’t say and I’ve been trying to write but I’m still alive anyway and the other side feels so strangely home today like a black hearth that’s still just warm enough that I can’t feel any chill but I survived one more day and I’m alive.
I had a little flash of clarity a moment ago.
My mind wandered to the future and tried to think about 2027. It’s still a black hole, like it doesn’t exist. I feel myself pulled towards that reality, or rather, lack of reality, still. However, I’ve noticed that it:
I hate everything
Bitterly I remember
Myself most of all
A forehead under lips,
Under a chin;
Face to face, soft cheeks press each other
Back into chest they lean…
I realized today that I can disappear in small increments.
Instead of doing it all at once in one big, difficult, dramatic exit, I can instead just die quality, one piece at a time.
Self-erasure will be my salvation.
Less and less of me, quietly disappearing, retreating into hiding.
I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner, especially once I realized that the more I retreat, the more I am accepted — further proof I don’t belong in this time.
Like the waning moon
Peeking from behind dark clouds
Quietly shrinking
My cold, dark feeling
My hidden wisdom so hard to find
My searching for everyone who’s fled and scattered and hid
…
The echoes that follow us
ride our shadows to stay at our side,
bearing down on us somehow
from the ground at our feet…