cold air is burning my face but the feeling is muffled, far away.
i look at you, stoic menace.
you are a block of ice and i am a flurry of snowflakes, raging, cold, soft.
you ask me what the heart speaks.
i do not know how to tell you what emotion is, just like i do not know how to explain to you what i am.

(things far too familiar are seldom easy to translate into a language someone might understand, a language that is not your own, a language you've forgotten the taste of)

mountains on my shoulders feel lighter than they should, and you take lightness to mean of less matter.
perhaps you think these mountains have a hollow center, are made of feathers.
you and i are two different forms of water.
i have known ice, and you have known snow, years before today.
i have known stagnance, you have known change, you took the word like an icicle to your chest, falling too far into your cave.
pull me out, you say, and i am frost lining your windowsill.
leave me be, you say, and you are a dull fog, whispering to glass.
through the glass, we interact.
you are trapped.

Slouch the rounds
of doctor
and therapist,
hands on my knees
in waiting room
chairs. My eyes
have trouble
meeting their eyes
and I become
an expert
in rugs and corners,
in traffic patterns.

A new drug comes,
and I take it
like communion,
holy water
from the tap,
wafer in
a blister pack.
It takes a week
to crenelate
the blood, until
the smoking mirror
in my mind
is cleared.
I exorcise
the patterns
of night thought
with bell book
and candle
that come
thirty to a bottle.

Every night
St George and
his red cross flag
wields a lance
of lithium salt
against a
perpetual shadow,
a piece of my brain
that flickers
and hisses
like the dead
channels that lay
between the shows
on my childhood
television.

New dose
switches on
around 2 pm.

My mind shrugs
off the shape
of the shadow.

Anxiety's buried
under confident
emerald obelisks.

The day is given
back to me,
engraved.

The slipping sun
is silver,
far away,

& the gloam
is a table
of wet glass.

I told someone that I would marry them.

And everything seemed well.

But as of right now, she disappeared almost a week ago.

I don't understand.

I don't even believe in marriage, but I would have done it for her.

I don't understand.

This is the second time.

I don't understand.

When was I cursed?

I don't understand.

I've wanted to be with someone since I was a child.

I don't understand.

Is this just how it's going to be for me?

I don't understand.

Will I take the late night walk

Will I listen to those songs

Will I write about it

Will I watch someone walk out

before I have no more capacity to believe