Work Text:
I feel it on my skin, building up under my fingernails,
In little beads of sweat on my collar bones at night, running off and pooling evidence on my sheets
Dust in my lungs,
A sudden sense of the space under my chin,
An ache between my shoulder blades
It slips in, a draft under a door, and I don’t always notice right away
Empty air made dense, my joints stiffen
A memory, some single instance out of many,
Flares up to make the same sounds as it did before, or ones that sound the same,
Loop, rehash, snip, edit,
Whispering to me from behind my eyes and making old things change color.
It tints the new.
When I’m alone, we are together, my periphery
A shimmering wish with regret for a shadow, a lie
It blurs the silhouettes of other people as they reach for me
Its image regurgitated from the pit in my stomach and pasted over what’s really there and I,
I am left too hungry to eat
Sometimes, I shake my head and it falls out.
It always makes the floor sticky.