Little Fish

The end of the year, always this pale skin and fading breath. My energy falters; I feel the life recede as surely and as quickly as the tide, and all I can do is stand on the shore and try to hold on as best I can. It will pass. My body falls apart, I sit on the kitchen floor gasping for breath, and there's no telling what lifted lid released the demons. The dog paces anxiously, will not settle until nestled in along my left leg.

For a week, there was silence in this wretched mind of mine. There was peace and ignorant bliss, and I reveled in it like a desert in rain, smiling in all the right places and entertaining the ideas of strangers and futures unknown. But the room is silent now, and the ghosts begin to whisper again in the walls. I will not deny I have missed them: there is comfort in familiarity. But their adoration is cloying, they strangle what little air is left in this room until I am reduced to rubble under their thumb.

This is the life you chose. You were so proud in your disdain of other fates. You eat your words now.

Choke on them as they are going down.