My World is Occupied by Shadows

We are a whisper. We are a leaf on the current. We are here, and all too quickly, we are gone...but something remains, I am sure of it. I would bet my life, if it were mine to give. Surely you understand this, surely you see what I see.

The ceiling fan spins in a disconcerting wobble. I am back in my room in my chair by the window. I am disoriented, I have memories of drifting, of you disappearing into the darkness. When will this ever end? 

If only I had resisted 

If only I had refused. 

When did this all really begin? 

It is overlapped and braided.

It is all a convoluted knot. 

My life has no beginning and no end. 

There is no middle, no above or below.

There is only the eternal always, spread across time, spread thin as moth's wings, thin as the line I should not have crossed. 

If there were no words, if there was nothing that signified anything at all, would we still, and only, be entwined in that base and nameless desire? What is the word for when your mouth is moments from my mouth, or when your skin, for the first time, brushes hesitantly and desperately against mine? My eyes gaze stupidly into yours, my heart falls into the deep pit of our desire and it is all I will ever know. From that moment to forever, it is all I will ever know. 

My heart beats—like a drum, like a bar fight, like a cannon echoing through the ruins. I wake in a panic, the full moon casting heavy shadows across my sheets. The dark bands press against me, suffocate me in my sleep. 

I have only these words falling from my lips, drooling on my pillow, or spewing in fits, like sparks from a faulty outlet. I have only these words to stain the cloth laid out before me, my life, my only chance, a miracle woven from the filament of creation. I sit at a table set for one, I stare at the door and the empty chairs, I will not clear my plate until I am joined by another. 

My world is occupied by shadows. The living, pulled and stretched to somewhere other, until they are made translucent, barely there. I want the same for myself but I remain solid, fortified by the burdens that disappear for the others. I am mired in the sediment of sadness. 

And the other ones—the ones who have no form at all—they share my bed, wear my clothes. I feel them shift beneath my skin. I am an apparition of thoughts discarded. I am full of wonder, I am full of doubt. I want to believe you are the one who was promised. I want to believe in the contract forged by my abduction. I want to believe it was more than appeasement, that it was more than just a distant light stretching and fading into the unreachable, unfathomably black frigidness of night. 

I am all words. I choke on them in my mouth. I taste their vile uselessness. I am all words and they fall to the floor, heard by no one. The lightness has left them. They no longer float. They drop like rotted fruit, over ripe, over wrought. Over and over and over again.