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.

This is the kind of loneliness you find yourself
afraid to succumb to,
As though not writing about it
means not Acknowledging it,
As though pretending it doesn’t exist
will translate across a void
Will make it stop,
Stop hurting
Stop feeling empty
Stop being an absence
you can’t control.

(it’s still there: lurking, ever-present.)

This loneliness, or grief, or depression, desperation
– this thing you are not sure how to name –
It is like
a cocoon
of desolateness.

tiredness (–or fatigue, maybe–) seeps into every inch
of you, so you go on walks until
you think you will collapse,
and it doesn’t help,
doesn’t go away;
this irritation,
a listless meander
of helplessness

a desire to do something, anything,
to escape this boredom; prison of your own making
to make your self useful somehow, instead of
this wallowing creature you’ve turned into,
braced in the cold and telling yourself
I am not kind
for all the good it doesn’t do:
you do not know what it is you have turned yourself into.

if you were the sort of person who could take kindness
before it became a necessity, a mercy—
you like to think you’d be able to rearrange your words,
just enough to ask for help.

but you’re bad at it.

there is independence, warring in your bones with responsibility,
another unshakeable part of you
you don’t know how to throw away.

you stumble over different words, over
will your read this and
can I hug you and
I miss you
like it will be an answer

but people are only people,
and you do not know how–
there is a lump in your throat,
and you never know how to cross it:

you just want to be better,
you just want to stop feeling like this—
is all.

You miss people like they are limbs,
as though writing to them will keep you close,
will keep them close to you,
  a thing like friendship
strung out across oceans,
tethered with best-kept promises
with I miss yous
and I love yous
sent out in the night
written back in the dark

they might be your tether,
if only you’d let yourself
have one.

But you are afraid, of tethers,
You are a person ingrained with people leaving,
You know (barely) what it is like to watch them go
You know (far better) what it is to leave familiar shore
for unexplored land, unexplored treasure,
to carry longing in your chest
and unsteadiness in your heart
(you did not grow up knowing what it was:
to plant your roots in the ground
and stay.)

but missing is not the issue,
this half-ingrained part of you—
missing can not be the issue, not after a lifetime of it.

Missing is the thing you hold close to your chest,
That you hide and let yourself feel only
When you must think of home,
of home that means too many places
and not just one person, but many—
home that means something kept together in spite of things,
despite sleepless nights, shattered hearts, this separation called distance.

So you will tuck it inside,
because the aching is a part
of you, is a thing you understand, a thing
you have grown used to, like the way your
body continues to draw breath
no matter how things hurt.

dear little star:
this is to say
that down below,
there exists an infinite
chasm, of the galaxy
waiting in case you slip
watching in case you fall
saying, "We are here to help."
if only you ask.

darling little star, high in the sky, a reminder--
You shine bright, and clear.
We see you and think wishes
across patches of sky, ask you
to make them come true.
But there are other stars, there,
by your side.
please-- don't shine so bright
that you extinguish your light.

dearest star, still glowing in the dark;
there isn't as much light, as there was
before. Sometimes
things flare like supernovas:
Bright and Blinding, but quickly gone.
there are less of you, less of us
than there used to be:
the nights are darker. the days are colder.
fear creeps, with tendrils like smoke
clawing and choking, echoing
its way in. You
are still there,
shining
bright.