I Used To Feel Good In The Summer
It was the waiting that hurt the most. The longest years you've ever felt. Cold and gray at the edges, wetter and desolate in-between, and terribly strange right around the middle. It was so familiar in its misery. Like your toes being freezing cold while the rest of your body was warm.
It was the waiting that hurt the most. The winters that lived deep inside your chest. Your empty, empty chest. The spring only brought you anger, the summer's worth of stepping on needles and gritting your teeth only brought you such a fierce emotion that held no name. The autumn which brought you a calmness, an apathy, a swirling mess of wanting to destroy things and make things and hurt people and help people and nothing nothing nothing at all. Winter brought cold lips and hands and feet. Winter brought your voice raw with the screaming, the agony. The building up of such a thing and it hurt it hurt it hurt and it was so frustrating.
It was the waiting that hurt the most. The crows kept you company, cawing and clawing at dead carcasses. They talked to you like they would talk to a dying person. And you supposed they were. The skin on your body felt wrong, somehow, and you wished the crows would have torn at your skin. It was a desperate wish for freedom. But a murder of crows, however the name, would not murder you. Perhaps they knew you had to wait it out. Wait out this cold solitude, or this feverish burn behind your fingernails and you imagined them scraping and scraping at the skin that binds you. The body that held you here.
Who are you? Who were you?
What's it like six feet under? In the sky?
What did your dying breath feel like?
I bet it felt like relief. The waiting was over, then, and your body could decompose and your spirit would be connected with be roots in the soil. With Mother Earth and her warm, warm heart.
and if you missed living, it would only come in flashes of memory and the smell of rain and crows and the bloody mess of it all. and you could hear a symphony of calmness, but not calmness--a contradiction. you'd see the summers you used to enjoy. how long ago that was. How Strange You Used To Be.
