It's 2 am
And something familiar inside me spreads its wings
And ***** drunkenly against the windowpanes,
The ceiling fan
The moldings.
It
Wants
OUT
And I do not know how to tell it
There is no out.

It's you, isn't it?

No, it can't be, you can't linger like this.
Not safe-
You are not allowed
In here.
You are not allowed to snare me in beauty and complexities and answers
And make me feel.
I'm not sure you know
But
Your words stick around after you have gone.
They course through me, filling up my bones
And try to force their way back out through my skin
My fingertips
My lungs.
And I try
To be still.

Something about who you are upsets the balance of me
And the thing I have learned to cage stretches and begins to press out,
Having heard the echoes of permission to exist.

I've swallowed a thunderstorm like a pill
And it has seeped into every vein and capillary
And made it all chaotic and full of motion.
My skeleton hums and vibrates like a struck tuning fork.
I am aware of the power in me and it demands release
And I have no answer for it
Like always.

I have no answer for you,
Go back to sleep.
Your screams would break my bones
Your song would still my heart
Your embrace would crumble me to dust.
I have no answer for you,
For if you emerge we are both finished.

It shudders.

I shudder.

And all of me except my body rises up an inch
And crashes back down like the tide.

I think of how I always end up painting with my fingers
No matter how many brushes I have
Because I need to feel the colors.
I think of holding hands briefly
As a child
With a beautiful, silent marble statue in the museum
And enduring the rebuke for wanting to feel its skin.
I think of the moment before a kiss, when I'm so close I can feel the heat of her lips
And how I have to pause there and let that moment smolder
Even though it adds to a longing that will not diminish with contact
Only grow.

Whatever lives in here with me writhes and reaches for the inky black windows and the whitewashed fields beyond.

I think of Ellen wiping her friend's tears away with her thumb- a tenderness I'd never seen in my life until then.
I think of pressing Therese's palm to my cheek and wishing with all my heart that I could give her every breath I'd ever taken.
I think of you kissing the scars of a girl you didn't know.

The idea of it
That unnameable moment of rising
Undoes something inside me
And the house fills up from the basement to the eaves with what I can't rein in.
It consumes me, it drowns me.
I forget where the surface is.
I forget that there is a surface.
I leave the house and fill the sky,
My fingers sifting through the cold velvet of night
Desperately searching for an answer,
For an assurance that, somewhere, this longing has a limit
And will not engulf the universe with its agony of feeling,
Forever hungry to the point of pain.

I find no edge.
Is this freedom? Is this the last moment?
Is it
Supposed
To hurt?

And then
Just as suddenly
It all returns to me at once
Slams into my chest
And my temples itch with electricity:
Once again I hold the tension of every wish I never dared to speak.

Resigned,
I turn out the light.