[▶] for safekeeping.

cold holiday

the time of year
you see lights adorning the trees and city streets
glinting, colour winking at you from
neighbours' balconies,
front yards
window grilles
you see people gathering in the houses opposite
all dressed in reds and whites and the table laid

you see myriads of people in the streets
and everyone is walking next to someone
a hand in a hand, a laugh,
you wonder if anyone feels alone despite that.
somehow being around people doesn't help you feeling less alone.

wonder what it's like if I ever
skip away to a city somewhere far away
and I stare out the windows at snow I've never seen fall
as my apartment bare of even a tree stands in
the winter cold
I sit alone and try to warm myself up as I drink the small mug of hot chocolate I made with a pack from the store
and I think back to my friends back home and if they're celebrating with family
and I breathe because there is nothing else to do.

and now I write this but I am at home, aren't I? what reason is there to grieve
and my heart is aching to get away from it all -
yet I don't want to be alone.

I somehow miss yesterday.
I had a lot of big feelings then.
and it's a surging, harrowing winter
creeping beneath the hollows of your bones and rushing through the grates
before it bursts through and breaks through the ground and usurps you from the
inside out
when you've forgotten how to feel, feeling so many things at once is so incredibly overwhelming
I woke up feeling absolutely empty
and suddenly I can't remember the sound of
your voice.

I walked by the searing, nauseating yellow of the tarpe the other day
to see my grandparents, still alive
while being reminded of a similar facade just a year ago
when my maternal grandmother died.
I think of how ironic and cruel it is for someone to die
so close to christmastime.
how do you...deal with that?
I feel like I don't have the right to celebrate.
I want to - but

wanting to tap into the sorrow laying heavy in my heart and lungs
hook it up to a machine till it burns and slips away
rather than having to sit with it.
my blood feels like its laughing at me.

I don't want to be sad around christmastime.
but I want to run away again
and sit by the river and stare off into absolutely nothing.
something inside me collapsed years ago
the teetering skyscrapers on the brink of those
mirrored shards suspended in and beneath worlds
in that hollow endless expanse
still ticking, clockwork metal jarring, a minute hand
piercing fiercely, abruptly through my heart at
occasional intervals

I want to run away.
but I don't want to be alone.
I don't know what to do.