two drifters, off to see the world

It's this,

this numb, floaty, slightly disconnected feeling you get

when you've stuck a needle in your vein and you're staring at it.

Except you're not quite disconnected.

The one thing you're connected by is this tiny twitch of a pain.

It's that moment somewhere between vague discomfort and pain etched in the anticipation of pulling the needle out when you're done feeling all the things you think you needed to feel.

Or at least it is sometimes.

Only during the best of it.

Most times it's the aching absence of weight that you didn't even know you could miss.

The fullness of your name sits heavily, so heavily on my tongue,

behind my teeth,

like something I would bite into to tell myself that it's real.

That you are.

I went running. And I thought I would scream, because I kept running up against myself. I couldn't breathe, kept tripping and kept coming too damn close to screaming your name. The name my breath could spell out in the dark.

Instead,

my body's been folding.

Folding inwards, around the cold space that you have left such a long, long time ago.

Has it really been that long now, how did those years pass me by?

And if it's not one name, it's another.

Circles, I'm always going in circles and that fucking tape plays on a loop and my voice cracks at dinner and it's just a note too high or three or four, I don't even know anymore.

I want to tell you.

I want to tell you how sometimes you can't be hurt enough physically for the world to know what's been done to you.

You didn't, after all.

(But that's not your fault. Really, I'm just saying.)

I want to tell you how, believe it or not, you don't have to have drank at all to blank out.

To find that you are floating overhead,

watching the whole thing happen.

To feel the time crawl by

as you count the distance between you and the blade by your bedside table.

The one that sits atop your leather-bound bible;

full of promises that you will cling to all your life afterward.

I want to tell you how the worst pain you can feel is sometimes,

most times,

not even physical.

And it sits with you and burns the inside of your skin,

its laughter snaking along the walls of your inner ear.

I want to tell you how that pain brings me full circle to a different sort of pain that happened too soon after that.

And how my breath catches again with a name I can't say aloud,

and an ache I'm not supposed to feel anymore.

And how, some days, I feel like I want to disappear.

And how, I reach for a book on my shelf

that hits too close too home.

And how I run and run and run and even when it's gotten darker I can still

see my shadow and it weighs me down with the knowledge of all the things

all the things I cannot outrun,

even if I tried.

I want to tell you that the whine and whirr,

or the ringing or the sound of merciless hacking that fills my ears just before I fall asleep is sometimes

the only thing I can hold on tight to as I drift off.

I want to tell you that I could do with someone saving me.

But I don't know where to start.

we were after the same rainbow's end