I'm so cold. You have no idea.
I'm sitting in the swells of my own mind,
thinking about how I'm thinking about how I got to thinking about you again.


This can't be healthy.
I have a bruise that's spreading from my chest to the rest of my body,
and for that, I'm being punished. Because it's my fault
my body tells me,


it's my fault for letting my mind meander through the desolate halls,
where the walls are lined with grease-marks from oily human hands,
with each individual swirl of the person ingrained in every one of those brown stains.


And it's my fault for not knowing what my stain is, what an individual is.
Perhaps I have yet to "possess myself", in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson.


But I can't think about me without thinking about you.
I can't think about you without thinking about everything else that left a stain.