Sometimes when you have been away for a while, or when I've felt you shut me out, my wanderings through the night change.
I used to be sad when you would fade away.
I used to mourn you over and over, every time you retreated from me
And came crashing back like the tide.
But now...
Maybe I've just lost too much these past months
And have no mourning left in my heart
Clean, like the leaves are after a long brutal storm,
Maybe I am simply tired after this life of longing and loss, but as I walk, every shadow takes something of me with it.
Every glittering pool of lit rainwater
Every flower holding darkness like a mist around it
Everything I look upon, everything that touches me
The heavy, wet air, the soft ground, the dull charcoal sky, the trees with bits of skeleton beginning to show beneath their flames of leaves,
They take what I need gone from me.
They take who I am, the person who loves you,
Until I am just an outline of myself,
Just the sketched lines of a person, so faint as they kiss the cheek of the night.
Make me new.
Make me velvety black like the sky. Take my complexities, the twisted knots of my desires
And spread them across the land like a spiderweb.
Let them snag the fat tears the moon leaves in the grass when dawn banishes her.
Let somebody else worry.
I wander until I am truly alone. Until I am lost.
I am not myself by the end. I am not anybody
And a strange sort of bliss seeps into me with the shadows and the quiet: Ah, finally.
I breathe in the moonlight, let it light the planes of me that still exist with its iridescent glow.
And although I know I will return, come rushing back the way the sea rushes to fill every footprint on the beach...
That is then, and this is now.
For now I am a breath not taken,
A sentence thought but never voiced,
A moment missed in the blur of the world going by.
And I am happy to be so.