What It Does to You

You take out the trash and spin little white lies around your tongue wondering if you let them fall from your lips would they tear everything you’ve been building for so long apart in the spark of an accidental instant.

Keep it together.

Shake it off. Get over yourself.

The tall trees are lush and green with the sweet heat of summer as they sway on the breeze, while the sky is the kind of razor sharp blue that stabs in your chest and makes you wish you could just be alone for a while to figure things out on your own.

But the rush of demands is how they steal your life away, minute by minute, like a strategy, like a sport. As you chase the pain, they run out the clock.

Time has a way of collapsing in on itself, in on you. You can feel it in that knot right at the center of your shoulder blades. The boss and the kids and the leak in the basement and the dreams you once had all screaming so loud in your head that it’s hard to find your own voice and pull it from the wreckage of the things inside you let die long ago.

The days are long but they fade swiftly into oblivion with everything else and you find yourself wondering what any of it means, how many soft heartbeats line the rest of the path you’re meant to take. You carry such grand visions in your soul, there’s a secret place beaming and bursting with fire amidst the gray.

There is something out there, you are sure of it. It slides through your veins like a whisper, somewhere you belong more beautiful than this. But it won’t get you rich and it won’t tuck you in and you’re not sure if the wild that once was within you is there anymore.

Sometimes the dream is too big and in the vastness between your hand and your breathing, the hope they fed you circles thinly down the drain.

Did you know if you count the seconds from when a satellite first appears on the horizon to when it finally disappears on the other side of the sky, it takes the exact same amount of seconds for it to come back around and reappear again?

Try it, I mean, if you happen to find yourself on top of the world and have the time.

The night air is stiff and cool as it comes through the open bathroom window.

The face in the mirror is a barren moon with rock white eyes. Brush, rinse, spit, repeat.