I had not realized, until years later
Locked in a room with some wet mixture of paint
Drying around the edges inside me
Crusting, not really drying like paint is supposed to.
I told myself I understood that I didn't understand
That we didn't get along
There was no reason for love.
She stole my heart and that was okay,
And she'd steal it again when I took it away.
That she was feral and strange and not at all like me
Until, hiding in my little lit up world
Flooded with blue and softness
A dog, and a cat, and a gray blanket
I was warm and content, and ignoring the dark shadows in the back of my mind
But also so cold at the same time.
It was a good day, the kind where you tumble along like a bubble riding a stream
Nothing of interest in the day's report
Until something stands out.
Only one thing stood out
And it filled my warm day with cold, like two hands of opposite color linking,
Black as ink and white as the trim on my gray blanket
Touching, but never mixing
And in my book,
I read the words "sick with a miserable happiness."
And like a boot
Falling in my stream, popping my bubble
And forever warping the path I would take
I understood what she was, and what reason there was to love.

I miss being a child
When I had no boundaries,
And those around me had none of their own

We would drink each other in,
Our minds racing, probing,
Great sweeping limbs pressing into every corner,
Ink oozing into cracks and out of seams
And thunder peeling away layers like a bullet's exit through metal

We drank and drank,
Tipped cups of humanity
And spilled the vast consciousness of life down our chins,
Our throats, and soaking the shirts we wore,

And we learned,
Of each other
And of ourselves
And of the world.
A child's world, it now seems

I feel the press of adults.
I have not had a drink in so long
And I see this cup, one of existence and expanse,
I see it sitting so lonely in the center of my town square

People, adults, are everywhere, pushing
And forming a fountain of empty stone around it
Shuffling and averting their gaze

I feel like a sore spot,
My eyes are attached to the drink by fired harpoons
I cannot move them, I cannot move my head,
And I most certainly cannot move my body,
Where adults are streaming past me like water down a drain

Why don't they drink?
They must surely feel this feeling I feel,
Like bamboo shooting from my stomach
Like my mind rotting without the essence of life

They refuse to drink,
And becaue I am in this adult world,
I refuse to drink too

Why do I echo in the endless void?
It makes sense to me that in this nothingness
my voice would be swallowed from my lips,
pulled from my throat
and lost to the liminal silence of nonexistence.

The horizon was only something I could imagine,
an intangible idea I could grasp with the barest edges of my mind
and yet, it spoke to me.
My voice was returned to my ears, warped and misshapen,
a single variation from the mouth of true nothing. A gift.
I began to sing to the void.
Delicate songs slow and high,
broken, to avoid being lost to the infinite warble of space,
a thing of oblation and humanity.

With so much time my heart tired of that lonely devotion,
the ringing solidarity of a single soul.
I yearned for something greater than what had become of me,
something greater than the timeless pit I submitted to.
I abandoned the pinprick care of my song, and
embraced the only companionship I would ever have.
I stepped away from delicacy, and into echo.

I dove into the void, howling my right to blinding sound.
Notes blended and crashed against one another,
my chorus, mirrored voices swelling into a creature
unrecognizable.
My existence was many and entirely mine,
changing my world from nothing to everything. But
such immolation can only last so long, with
silence always hovering just beyond my efforts.
Eventually I needed rest, each burst of creation more taxing than the last.

Rest became hiatus, and hiatus the stillness I knew before.
I could not defeat forever, and I could never reach the end of infinite.
I did not sing. My voice began to tremble, to thicken.
My voice began to fight me.
And with time, it failed me.
The first crack
like the hand of God clapping against the earth,
sealing my fate
and leaving me with the agonizing awareness
of my own disuse.