Sunlight dims to gray pretending to fall through the window as I pretend my mind is not so full of madness I can taste the blood in my gums. When we speak of art, of beauty, of the written word, of what do we actually speak? Mostly torture. Mostly the cutting away of every untruth the others cannot even detect. I’m no better at life but I do show up and the showing up is usually what tears the skin off the bone.
They say you have to keep going even in the face of adversity and then they try to convince you that the adversity comes from outside. Look on the walls, they say to you; look into their flush faces, listen to their unbridled hatred. We cannot admit the demons are really on the inside, that the monsters may multiply but they all wear my face.
Gazing into the dresser mirror, I think of the way you left me stronger than you found me and then I question even that. To know you was to love you by untying the fears which kept me pinned to the ground. I came up to the surface for air only to discover you and you were a drowning I wanted more than life itself. Why do we do these things, why do we cringe and sweat over the way certain people kiss with death all stained upon the mouth.
Why do we try, why do we write, why do we peel the mothworn curtains back just to reveal another day. To get to something. And even though we know it’s there we fight ourselves to get to it anyway. We the small slits of intimacy, we the sharp unnatural bends in the wing.
When no words worth repeating show up I imagine packing away my notebook and heading back into the world gutted by depletion, rejected even by myself and I know that is the heaviest burden of all. To feel that there is not one single place in all the world – outside or in – where you belong.
Maybe the bad days are just the way too many good ones weigh us down in the quiet moments we never speak about. Maybe they blend the unforgiving sky with the cold rain and even our insides are made of decay. Maybe I just have to wait, and I can do that. I hate it. But here I am, waist deep.
.
Allison Marie Conway 