Mask

You wake up nervous. Check to see if it's easy to breathe, look around you and don't trust the lightness, know better than to lean on it. You left a candle lit last night, planning to just let it burn out but here it is, still flickering. It smells like a body you once loved, but memory is so fickle, perhaps that's not quite how it went. I don't remember the last time I put on clothes.

Saunter into the kitchen: you long for morning coffee as early as the afternoon before, but this time it's hard to get any across your lips. If you open your mouth to let it in, you may let something else out; your body is a brick that can turn into a flood. He says I think you need a hug, but the things I need are a chasm, a lifetime of compensation has yet to fill it. Spend a lifetime trying to convince yourself that this shiny new person that you conconted in your limbs, that you sewed onto your skin, can be real, when all it takes is one look in the mirror to recognize the aberration as who you truly are. As of today we are required by law to wear masks in the street, to cover our faces to protect those around us, how's that for a cruel joke. I spent so many years trying to take the other one off.

Outside, it rains. It rains, and it rains, and it rains, she asks you to come by and sit on her stoop, but you have nothing left to offer, you cannot carry another's burden when drowning in your own, the weather report says it cannot rain forever, the weather report says just hold on, it will pass. I sit in the window with a racing heart and a frozen lung. It'll pass.

One day you will be dead,
and none of this will matter.

It'll pass.