The last few days
have been those dreams you had
as a child, falling off cliffs but never really
crashing.
There are bad days and then there are exceptional ones. Those that feel like fingernails dragging on a small chalkboard in your head. Like life slowly leaving your favourite feng shui plant.
You shut your eyes
and beg for it to stop.
but the hamster keeps running on its wheel and the hourglass fills up with sand.
A bird in a golden cage, you sit pretty
and wait for the sun.
What else is there?

A new day,
beautiful.
You pray,
no more bad days.
No headaches from overthinking, no scraped nail polish from all the chewing
Enough!
So you go up
Up to the gold in the sky
And let your wildest laugh
set a fire so bright that
darkness lays down its shroud
and gives way to songbirds
to come perch on your shoulder and whisper
sweet love songs in your ear until
you learn to dream of fairy lights on the beach again.
Or so hope.
What else is there?

I lay my body down                          in the lush by the river.
with the sun I'll depart                   to the other side.
For far too long I've tried               to make home of love;
bricks of support,                              mortar of laughter.
I would build a house                      that drowned each year.
A thousand kisses                             couldn't save it
from the slightest huff                     of the summer wind.  
I guess for some people,                  love is a rental apartment;
comfortable,                                        but never really yours.
So I collect my silver                        and wave to Charon
upon his boat I'll travel                   to the other side.
I pack loaves of love                         and morsels of hope
to sustain my soul                              in the arduous voyage
along the monstrous spine            of the river Styx.
I will try to build a home              again, this time
with  sand of heartbreak,               cement of despair.
I'll line the walls with                    the love I carried
and pray to Styx,                               to bring all her might
on my tiny home.                               This time
    
                                       it won't drown.

You have always been a whiskey person, but you sip on warm Kaluha today,
the caffeine seeping into your dark lips
like age has seeped into the spine of your home
slowly, crack by crack. The walls have eaten
paint for so long and now they're bulimic,
throwing up shards of plaster on a floor
matted with dust. You sit on the huge armchair,
the one your grandfather smuggled in parts out of Lahore, and stare at yourself in the huge mirror on the armoire your grandmother got in her dowry. A broken teapot stares at you, sitting among other cracked China, in the high glass cabinet in the kitchen. Your mother served a million cups of tea in this house while your father sat and recited poetry in the verandah. The pillars of this house know your stories and the old mattress in the guest room still remembers the taste of the salt in your tears.
This house has been home to all your dark and all your light yet there is little left now. It feels as if the house went through a series of heartbreaks and now has given up on love. You identify with it more now, than you ever have.
And you know its time to leave.
Leaving is hard, but staying has become its own cancer, slowly spreading dark in your veins
and the house's.
So you sit with your home, one last time, thinking of the rights words for the perfect Goodbye, yet all you can manage is a grunted sigh.
A single tear makes a plop in the dust below. You put down your glass of Kaluha in the wet of your tear and walk out the door.
It takes everything in you
to not turn back.