Winter snaps at your sleeves,
Cold chills making you shiver,
like a thing you are meant to
run away from --

But you have always loved
this part of the season, the wind
whipping through your clothes,
as if to say,
alive, alive, alive.
like a reminder, fresh off the bay:
don't you dare, it nudges at you,
Alive, it says, awake, awake, awake. &
(maybe you need it, sometimes,
that memory, that reminder:
don't you dare, it tells you,
and it's enough to hold onto.)

Until it rains as much as it pours,
until mud soaks your skin through.
And the night tries to eat at you,
**** away what little you have left.

So melancholy settles in,
the reminder that you have never
been weightless; the faintest echo of
I miss you never escapes you but
for helpless sobs in fading twilight;
the winter air is keeping you afloat,
still, is hanging all your readymade
promises like stop signs in your face,
but you feel tiredness like an ache
in your chest, in your bones, like
a thing about to break.

You learned how to lie
the same summer you learned
how not to eat, pieces of yourself
fading away the more you said
i'm not hungry, and meant it.
You learned how to lie
the same way you learned to be quiet,
the right people looking at you wrong,
the wrong people picking out pieces
to an asymmetric picture -- too late,
you learned how to lie like it was easy, the way breathing (maybe) wasn't.

And you stopped because people cared just fast enough to matter,
stopped because you looked at yourself, one day, all hollowed out,
stopped in an instant, like it was easy,
How, how, how, like the guilt pounding through you,
like it was enough:
How could you do this to yourself?
Like the answer wasn't simple,
Like apathy and caring too much couldn't exist side by side,
Like you hadn't stopped pretending that everything didn't hurt years ago,
Like you believed yourself when you promised it wouldn't happen again.

And yet here you are: be it winter, not spring; all alone again, so **** tired, again, the sadness unburied, spilling out.

And you should stop. yourself, take stock, remember what it is like to love to be alive before you go back to hating it, before you go back to not caring; but you are so tired, here, now, you think you might've skipped it: the part where you catch yourself. The part where you let someone else catch you. The part where it matters.

Alive, alive, alive, the wind hisses.
Don't you dare, it says, as your eyes water from the cold.
You are awake, it seems to be saying, alive, like you are still worth saving.
Maybe it will be enough.