Soft Threats

Sitting alone in the early morning, I let every frightening feeling wash over me and then wash away. I want to be a blank slate for this day. Be fully at its mercy when it comes peeking through the curtains at dawn.

If I am not up before the rest of the world, before all the little lights across the neighborhood start flickering on, I cannot organize a single thought for the rest of the day. It is, therefore, paralyzing to write and paralyzing to not write.

You see what I’m up against.

Peeling back the eyelid of jet black sky, I reach with everything I’m made of toward a place far away from here where pain and sadness dissolve. Think about the freakishness of liminal space. A sanitized art gallery after hours, glaring in its bleached-white emptiness. Living works and ghosted halls. Even the dead grow eyes and lay them all over you. Rows and rows of crooked hotel doors buzzing in blinking neon light. Something in the way a plain looking woman sips coffee alone in an airport terminal at three in the morning.

Madness comes in a comfortable form occupied at the wrong time. Time of day or night matters in this case. A parking garage late at night and footsteps pounding against the walls. You remember the way he pressed you against the concrete and you couldn’t resist the thrill of feeling his heat claim everything you had to offer. What is it about power. What would you do if it was yours instead. The thought makes you dizzy and wet and you blush and you hate yourself.

Each person you left behind is an abandoned building with the windows smashed out. You know how to leave, you’ve done it countless times before with a sadistic kind of ease. But liminal space describes suspense and suspension, it exists on a plane which is a precipice, a place on the edge of something about to come next. A transitory place.

It is possible to linger too long where you do not belong. You could go or you could stay but either way you will only make things worse. So you stay and you stay and you stay but the world that once surrounded you is gone.

I wait on approval from an invisible someone who never shows up. I am a waiting game all on my own. And it isn’t the fact that I don’t ever know what’s coming next. It’s the waiting that is killing me softly in my sleep. The full moon slides down along the window like an hour glass and the soft threat of morning goes on and on forever.