As the flash of another day burns the tall glass buildings down to graystone, we move closer to each other like an uncomfortable evening fog. You are whiskey and I am torn blue jeans. We are both bare feet and distraction.
We are together even when we are apart, an impossibility it would seem, and so very far apart when we are together.
What is it?
I can feel it. The weight of too many worlds hanging like lead from your tired limbs. You can be sad here. I will not sweep the graypain in our midst away. Show me.
Open your wounds in front of me and I will not crumble, I will not break. I will not disappear.
Even from across the room I can see your light, I promise it is not gone.
Have I ever told you that I think you are stronger than the others for coming undone? Forget what they have told you, to unravel is not easy. It might be madness but it is real, the way we close ourselves tight around secrets we no longer have to keep. Love is barbed wire, love is midnight falling along the trees.
Tell me the mess about yourself that you do not understand. About the dreams which seem to fall away from you as you reach for them across the strange pulsewaves in your mind. I know it is hard sometimes. I know it hurts to be alone and yet all you want in all the world is to be unafraid of being alone.
Tell me how the aching in your heart feels like rainfall sliding down the gutters of your clouded eyes. I want to know how the cold feels the way only you can feel it, how the snow upon your bare skin sometimes rests warm like springtime even though no one seems to understand.
I believe you. Everyone has their troubled bones but no one else has yours.
So tell me about the sorrow that carves away at you; tell me what seems to ruin your touch and dissolve your breathing. Tell me the lies and the truth and how you are ashamed of both, and we will sort through whatever it is that cries at the center of your soul, at the tips of your fingers, at the back of your throat.
Tell me what it is to be so gruesomely, ironically human.
Speak for me the terrible quiet burden of this mad beautiful life.
.
.
Allison Marie Conway 