I can’t fit. I can’t find the right door to pass through. The sunlight is rapidly fading. Snow is falling all around me and all I can think about when I look at the flakes is how they might look like the ashes after my everything burns to nothing.
Wolves are circling. Closing in. I can hear their howling signals.
I’m running out of time.
Dead ends still float along beside me
Vague, they crawl up my back
To rest on my shoulder…
Here, today I stayed
I stayed angry
But I stayed
…
Ebbing and flowing
Under the pull of the moon
And the heat of the sun
…
Waves still rise and fall
Anchors begin dissolving
I begin to drown
Waves still rise and fall
Anchors begin dissolving
I’m starting to drown
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 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.