We'll Always Go On

Falling

A day of half - resisted advances. A week of reluctant rendez-vous-es.

That's what you liked to call them, Robert.

You know who else liked to call them that?

Take a wild guess. Squint hard into my past; the ripped canvas of the painted sets, torn to shreds by my own mind.

Can you see him?

He's in the darker corners. Razor eyes.

Can you see him?

I can.

A month of one - sided courtship, because you just can't take a god damned hint, can you. Stop looking at me. Why are you like this? Leave glass fragments alone. Pick them up and they'll tear through you, too. Go buy yourself a stained glass window if you're so insistent. Fill your house with blown glass vases if you're so hooked on my addled metaphors.

Or, maybe, you know me better than I give you credit for. Maybe, you know that glass can't hurt you if the sharp edges are tearing through something else. Like, I don't know, me?

But I can sit behind these curtains I have, waiting for something, or anything, or nothing.

A dull, weak glow erases the blackness behind my eyelids. Funny, how the slightest trace can ruin the entirety of the whole. Shut my eyes tighter, add my hands. Then curtains and doors and streets and buildings.

Don't come closer to me. You're never far enough away. Your existence weighs on this tiresome city like a phobia on a sleepless mind.

I could run away. I could disappear into the wind, leaving everything behind me.

Where will I run to if I don't know where I am to begin with?

What could I do at that house party? I closed my eyes but the lights were still there, just barely under the surface. The world, reminding me that I couldn't escape, that it's still here, that I'm still here.
Robert holds my hand. It is not part of me. Don't think about it. Don't feel it. Don't pull it away in front of all of these people.
But my skin crawls like it's trying to leave my body, trying to escape the hand that's on mine, your hand.

I am alone here. I am alone, surrounded by voices. They are my own. They are not. They are real. They are not. They are smokey grey wisps in a foggy grey sky, an impossibility of useless obscurity.

I had to leave. I tried to excuse myself. I wasn't feeling too well, I said. It was true, because Robert had moved his hand to my waist.
A sick feeling tingled in my lower stomach, fogging my head and numbing my limbs. I knew it wasn't the baby; being sick from my pregnancy didn't make me feel like I wanted to sink through the floor.
I have to go, I said, trying to sound as sorry about it as possible.
I almost missed the look that Robert gave to a couple of the cast members. It doesn't matter, just go. Walk to the door.
Robert escorted me, and the rest of the group hung back.

I can stand in a crowd of people and they'll be a million miles away. They are a plethora of thoughts, a clamor of silent noises.

Dip curious fingers through that surface. See a network of lives, disconnected from its physical reality. Meanings that aren't meanings, personal swirls of emotion following a single idea in lifetimes of nostalgia and memory.

They are stars; a sky of single points, tiny and bright on flat, dark paper, wondered at from afar with hissing breaths and wide, unblinking eyes.

They are giants of fiery depth, full of complexities and light. They fill up miles with their deafening lives, silent in a soundless vacuum.

We know this but we shrug it aside and admire those icy flecks with shallow eyes.