In anticipation for the holidays

In a life of inconsistencies, let me describe to you something real.

You're with family and friends and your face feels flushed. The light is low and yellow and the sky outside is a beautiful dark colour and if you looked outside too long you would find yourself aching for the sight of stars. The city is buzzing, pulsing like a separate living entity, vitality seeping out at the edges like a ripe fruit - but all that has been stifled to a feeble lull. The city still exists as it is - but you have forgotten this. You don't care what your hair looks like, how frizzy or out of place it is or how wide and toothy your smile happens to be and every person is warm while everything else is cold. Things feel so genuine that nothing else could possibly matter. Of course, your family has flaws. They have conflicts and discrepancies that soil the underside of the cushioned seats where they were so expertly shoved. You don't have a lot of money. There are people out there who, if given the chance, would trip you as you passed by and as you pick tiny gravel rocks out of the imprints in your cheek this person would already be gone. Whatever these outside things may be, they have completely dissolved. This is family. This is raw. This has allowed you to forget.

"Absorption" isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind. 

           
Sometimes it isn't even an occasion. Sometimes it's just a gathering in the simplest sense and people are drinking soft liquor and spewing profoundly funny things and through your whole body passes a warm shiver. You can cut through this feeling like soft cheese, a feeling paired best with wine. Yet as you hang onto this misty, ambiguous feeling until your fingertips turn white, it slips through your fingers like running water. 

But as you very well know, the water will trickle into your palm soon enough, in one way or another.

                                                    

You can't hit me and quit me, baby.

I feel like I'm being crushed, but in the least violent sense of the word.

I feel like someone has flattened me, folded me up neatly with aligned corners and gently placed me in a box. And all the while I'm terrified because of their calm face and my panicked eyes and my heart is beating so fast, so fast and oh god I don't think I can breath but they're so calm and this box is so safe yet why am I scared I'm so scared--

And then I wake up with sweaty palms and reality floods into the deep shallow of everything and for a second there is only relief, raw and real. My head is soft against the pillow. Then the thought of it lingers.

It lingers, like a loose thread. It hangs there, and never leaves. Loyalty in the most violent sense of the word. My thread. I am burning myself with my own intensity, derived from every doubt and every word and every wet goodbye. In the way that the wave of a hand and the blink of an eye is wet and chaotic and far from beautiful. Far from dry but speckled with uncertainty. I am not entitled to these feelings, yet they're so real. Was there a mistake? Am I sorry? What is wrong with me? You would whisper to me and no trace, no trace ever came back to you and no trace ever came to me. This pain is requited. This hurt is different. There is light and there is burning. I hold my hand up and the light splinters between my fingers. This is burning.

My favourite past time is counting the silver fragments in your eyes and trying to compare it to the fragments of my worth, my ego building like a swaying mass of hot bricks. That thought - I always come back to it later, though laced with unprecedented worry. I turn people away for these false feelings. False, in the simplest sense of the word. There is pressure in my chest and the sky seems stitched to my head, the reminder of my thereness almost suffocating me. I can't fold up others and place them in my box. I can't fold myself up and place myself in their box. My corners are aligned and my eyes are panicked and I can't swallow but I need that calm face, that gentleness and still air to keep me from being crushed.

In the least violent sense of the word.