Distance

I've traveled. I've followed the sun and she's followed me. We've met in the middle on fleeting days and missed each other on brief nights. It's light forever, or dark for lifetimes. We've never been close, and I look up from my labyrinth to measure our separation. Constant, constant confusion. The same sun feels different through new skies. The same burns peel pink every summer, and I touch the raw skin with fresh fingers.

This year won't leave me sleep. I'm sitting calmly for the sunset. My head droops as the months birth each other and my vigil shivers in the cold and the spring. I have never been so tired. Sap tickles from my hands and glues them to the ground. Roots I grow pierce my sides, because I am the only water for miles. My body begs for a cool afternoon breeze, a signal of salvation. The blinding light sees through me, it makes me small against the glowing shadows. While I wait for a night I remember how I was impatient for the day, and I wonder if this is what it is to be full.

Mirrors walk by, their bodies welcoming. The glassy faces tell a different story, and I try to hear the conversation we should be having. It is all soft touches and bumps tonight, accidental contact. When I can't believe in people I believe in art. And beneath even that, there is a layer of knowing unknown, the promise of the learnable. People are lessons disguised as teachers. Feelings are forgotten memories that have found a softer bed.

When I climbed the hill, I had not made up my mind. I planned escape routes as I walked towards what I wanted. I was ready to duck out and run wide to avoid my clearer hopes in favor of muddled imagination. Not ready to admit or commit, my path stayed strong against the torques of impulse. Falling back into the shape I had twisted out of, my back yelped in pain. A sweeter sound than mumbling groans. Sometimes I dream to hurt.

They say look no further and I shut my eyes. Figures dance across the red glare of the blood in my lids, persons dissolving into each other and questioning my motives. I can't hide because they come from me, and I start to see that no one put them there. Outlines condense and I blink to see them more clearly. The current and the past blend into dark suggestions that I didn't hear for so long. Audible now, echos from inside, they amplify until I believe them blindly.

I wonder what it is to be warm, here in the winter-nest of isolation. It's not the feeling of dirt, though I've felt warm dirt. Truth can be warm, but only in small doses and warmth that does not persist is only a stutter of the ideal. I felt a tingle in a familiar chair, sitting down again like the last again, and this time sinking a little bit deeper than every before that was before this ultimate again.

A hand held out to me. The picture makes me sick. I will tell any story to distance myself from that reach. The depth keeps it fresh, stored in the dark where only I can corrupt it. Choosing taste, my fairy tale of decisions grows wings and flies home. I wander and spin in circles, moving not up nor down, but just wondering which way the incline points. I dream to the beat of my steps, counting tip toes until I wake up sweating and dizzy, and a ship sets sail without me. Oarsman wave goodbye underwater.

There is a drive to build houses in all of us, and I want to shelter under paper. My history drowns on shelves until it's bound into books. Walls can reach terrible heights, brick by brick and click by click, assembled with graffiti pre-painted and the mason's impressions fossilized in the foundations. Dedication and preface are all they will ever be, but they shed rain and salt winds that would chill me to my core.

Bent in pieces and scattered on the floor. Mouth muscles clench and sigh because they are determined to rule. They ride through the night screaming a warning and I absorb their confidence. I never know when to close my window or how to open a rusted latch, yet I do both instinctually with my nature sabotaging itself into unfavorable selection.

The fact remains: to feel unwelcome is worse than to be turned away. I bring my own darkness because no one turned on a light. They believe it's unnecessary in broad daylight, but some things are outside the visible spectrum.