In Sickness

We wander through life trying to find something we lost which we cannot name or even quite remember but we knew we felt its warmth once and it was all we needed. Human hands extend toward something inhuman, human hearts beat to the rhythm of a mysterious force. And for a moment I am kissing you beneath a crooked cloud of street lamps as my boots scratch the pavement cutting slits into the night air. There are bare trees and they are protruding in and out of the darkness which falls across your face. You are a shadow I reach for in the night when my humanity is so honest it hurts all over just to move, just to breathe. You took me to you. There was a touching and you were there as a whisper against an empty space. The morning light is a trouble I cannot shake, the unbearable dawn of a cold hard day which will not retreat. There is a heaviness rising in spite of its weight, it sinks in my chest as I stalk these interior halls. The sky opens its single eye to the turning of the planet, stillness, motion, chaos, disaster, kindness, anger, love. And we are alone upon a marble floor. Matchsticks scattered into the wind which moves beneath my feet. You are a figure in the back of my mind in the blood in my veins in a chair in a room smoking a cigarette. You watch as I unravel and place a finger to my lips. I love you but I can’t. And even though you never left I feel you leaving. And even though I misread the signs and believed in sickness over health, I meant it when I said your body reminds me of something I once curled up against. A phantom limb which vanished and I’ve not stopped searching since.