I have been
In my bed all day
Watching the sun cross
A thirsty sky
Soaking in sunlight
Like my brain soaks in
The nightmares that lurch and writhe
In the wrinkles of my bedsheets.
I have been trying to
Drown myself
In a cocoon of white
Two week old cloth
And the empty echo of my mind.
Depression is quite literally
A hole
Which you have to claw yourself out
And my body has impressed its depression
On my bed,
On a place of rest for others.
When the tungsten lights seep through under the curtains
My bed turns into a bottle in which I drown my sorrows.
Strange thoughts fill me
Of white thunder and ravaging claws instead of hands;
I am sown together with the fabric of nightmares.
My mother calls my name
It is a distant sound,
Like some long forgotten calling
Across a sea
And yet I reach a feeble hand
Through time and space
For an epiphany
Before falling into a tormented sleep,
Only to wake in the same bed
As the same person.
Rinse and repeat.
It has been
Six days
Six weeks
Six years
Since I felt anything
But a hollow absence of me.

I think I would rather have had gills than lungs.

To live and breathe under water would be such a ******* blessing.

A place where the icy touch of water smooths over the rough, aching edges of your skin.

A place where your screams dwindle to mere echoes at the distance of a hand-width.

Where sins wash like watercolours in the purple ache of night.

But we are creatures of the land.

Cursed with bipedalism and an unbridled view of the stars.
Naively destined to watch a movie with a happy ending,

When your own life is a car crash,

And hope.

I nurse my insomnia
Like an alcoholic recently off probation
Nurses his drink
Savouring every drop of liquor
Rolling it under his tongue
Slowly dying all the while
Of insanity
Rather than addiction.

i.
He told her
That mathematics was too
Sombre.
Too, too
Linear
To be poetic.

She said that
He had only seen himself
In a mirror,
A reversed hologram
Of his external self
Burned into his retinas with
His subconscious filling in the gaps.

But she had seen him
The rays reflected straight off him
Into her eyes;
Not some half-assed reflection
Off some silvered surface.

ii.
She said that
His jawline was
The ***** of a curve
Pencilled on a graph sheet.
His candlewax skin
A wavelength
Quantifiable on paper.
His spine
A number line with
Dashes, to show real numbers
The set of which was infinite.

She said that
A Fibonacci sketch was
A minimalist rose,
A post-modern bouquet.

And that
The reflected pale morning sun
In a half finished cup of camomile tea
Was a cardioid
With fixed coordinate values on the axes
And an algorithmic tangent.

And he
Was a negative infinity
A paradox not sorted under
Quine's classification system.

iii.
She had
Recorded his heartbeat and blood pressure;
Measured the distance between his lips with her own;
Tried so hard, so very, very hard
To put him down in a numerical form
And write him off as an equation.

But all she could say was
That he was more
Than the sum total of his meagre parts
And that she
Was his reciprocal value.

I saw a picture of two people kissing.
Their fingers entwined.
Their lips apart.
Smoke billowing from one mouth to another.

I looked away.

No.
What?
This picture isn't meant for me.
Why?
Show this to someone else.
Who should I show it to?
I don't know, anyone else.

I saw a picture of two people kissing once.
My eyes hastened over it.
It didn't feel like it was meant for me.
I rejected the sight of love.
It, quite frankly, repulsed me.

It looked too much like a train wreck.
It tasted too much like scotch.

I poured myself another.

*I would rather brave the headache alone,
Thank you very much.
There's the door.

Thirteen steps in, nine steps right.
Un, deux, trois.

Follow the flow, dear. Don't lose faith. There we go.
Have you been practicing? It's much better than the last, much better. Yes, I know. It's too soon, isn't it? Keep practicing, though. Get the jumps right, dear, you do, ah, tangle those up, don't you?

****. He won't like the jumps then.

She quietly swore as Madame left the room. It would be minutes now (and it seemed like less) that she would feel his hands snaking around the arch of her spine, his emotionless voice softly murmuring 'A little right, you've got it. It's never too difficult for you.'
Effortlessly smiling. Surveying the smooth movements in her limbs his labor translated to.

Stop it. What was the point. He was gone before he even..oh, what the ****. It didn't matter.

And she gave up trying to resist his memory, because it was like smoke inside her head, clouding up her survival instincts and filling her with the warm drowsiness of his caress. With his breath on her shoulder and the faint scent of mint and depression that hung around him. She used to tell him that he would smell like hospitals and he would grin (not those idiotically crooked grins the boys in her other class would throw at her, but a proper, ridiculously wide grin that made him look fumbling and slightly simple and made her feel something special) and he'd tell her the story about the first time he broke his shin and he'd stayed for three days in a hospital room that had no ceiling, and it was the most incredible thing ever, because you could see the stars.

'Stargazing', he would tell her, 'is a bit like looking into the past and the future all at once. Light takes such a long time to reach Earth that the light that reaches us from, say, Deneb, which is one thousand four hundred and twenty five light years away, is exactly that many years old. One thousand four hundred and twenty five years old. And you can see the light now and your three year old cousin will see it when he grows up and life forms from other galaxies will see it a million years from now and you can never,never stop that light even though the star itself will one day explode and collapse itself into negative space. But the light, until it is seen by somebody, anybody, until it forms an image on someone's retinas, will stay alone in the universe forever.
Beautiful, forever.'

Or for at least one thousand four hundred and twenty five years.

He was a lot like his stars, she surmised. His after-image seemed brighter than him, enough to burn your eyes and leave your throat parched and make your heart start aching.
But the boy himself was full of ****.

It's sad how everyone says 'he was' now. Not is. Was. Past tense, like they couldn't see his light still running up his ******* one thousand however many years. Like the negative space he occupied wasn't ******* burning up the sky with its brightness.

Or maybe he was a black hole, mercilessly engulfing light into its emptiness, spitting it out into another dimension where only she existed. Where the light was only for her and was invisible to the rest.

Or maybe he was just plain gone.



She hated believing in death. As she danced to Prokofiev she thought about how much she hated believing in death but now she had to because she couldn't feel his presence, and there was this little hole gnawing at her going 'gonegonegonegone' because he was dead and she was dancing and she wanted to stop the unfairness of it all because he was always the better dancer. He was always the better everything.

His voice faded in her head and his arm slipped away. She wanted to turn and say 'No, no stay. Don't go, please love, staystaystay.'

She didn't.
She didn't say it.

So maybe it was good that he was dead to everyone else and dying to her because she liked the idea of him slipping away and her head being occupied by her own thoughts. So she just kept dancing because *******, that's what I loved doing before you came along. And she pliéd and battement glissé dégagéd into position, two steps forward, one step right, finale chassé
and
then
allegro cabriole.

The feeling of flying. Her legs crossing and extending in mid-air. Her muscles screamed in pain and her face broke into a smile.

And her feet hit the glossed wooden floor. En croix.
A sickening crack. Her feet gave way.

But she was smiling.


From the window, Madame watched and thanked her son's ghost for finally letting go.
As the final bars of Prokofiev's coda emptied its lucid notes into the rattling vacuum of the city's pandemonium outside, she contemplated going in and helping the girl,
but.

This
      was
  her
        fight.

And what doesn't **** you.
   Makes you wish
it
*did.

A body cradled in a nightly cocoon of blankets and self-loathing.

A contact list full of numbers in which calls go straight to voicemail.

An explosive cocktail of one part perfection and three parts depression, with an overdose of cheap coffee.

A personality of anti-anxiety pills and choked down insanity, with a side order of slit wrists.

An A+ on your history test, smudged with tears and smuggled *****.

A sleeping tablet.

A mind like a room with the blinds down for weeks, a smile like a gunshot in the darkness.

A broken tape recorder of one missed calls, of slammed doors, of smeared lipstick in front of a mirror sparking with tears.

A cigarette for every sin, a dollar for every broken dream.

A full wallet.

A brain like a twisted forest path, a sketchbook full of scratched pencil marks, a screaming teacher at the end of every class.

A daughter of the human manifestations of nine-to-five jobs with a pension scheme and insurance.

A carefully maintained vocabulary of whiplash sarcasm and blank stares.

A graduating member from a class of 'Congratulations on Getting the **** Over Yourself.'

*A bullet.