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.
