solemn ;

not cheerful or smiling

i have never been good at beginnings; i always find my way somewhere in the middle, heightened and pending. then, punching my way into some final tableau

one of the first things i asked him was what songs are too painful for you to listen to? he did not really have an answer. i then ask, given the choice, would you rather be in a house with someone that is possessed or be the person possessed? i ask this over the span of several years. i try and answer but always come up short. i ask him this as if i do not already know the answer, as if i am not obviously the one possessed in the house we live. as if i am not the one whose head spins and teeth sharpen, eyes going black with rage and claw marks all over my own body, spewing something vulgar and venomous from my very own mouth

sometimes i wish to wipe it all away, clean the slate, from too much to take. a culmination of years of trial and error, a weight you cannot shake, the weight of a man now too cumbersome to bear. arms never able to be trapped, an animal nipped one too many times. i am sick, and i am heavy, and i am hurting, and i have no one—learned no foundations of trust and love and intimacy to guide me through these trying times of a lifetime. what is there to do? where is there to go? a man may love you, but what happens when that love does not penetrate—you were simply not taught that. you wish to hunt and harm yourself and others because rage and violence are the only things that come natural to you— teeth bared too young, the whisper of knowledge of a large kitchen knife on the counter; it would whisper to me, you know, it whispered my whole childhood until the whisper was a constant shout. you tied yourself to the satin pink and orange bed and blared the television as loud as possible to try and forget, to try and quit counting, to try and absorb the family on the screen as maybe could be your own. there is a permanent noose around my neck; it has created a constant lump in my throat. i say to him, stop smiling so much, it unnerves me. why should it? why should he? why can’t i?

a house is never a home; has never quite been. all it was and remains are walls too thin and surfaces either rough or soft to lay on, any sharp or heavy object just begging to be the next star of my waking nightmare. i hang picture frames as to not do the same of myself, pounding sharp objects into the walls as to keep them away from my own palms—yet it all does not quite fit, does not seem quite right. all looks like a child’s drawing thrown haphazardly onto the fridge—not because you wish to, but because you know you are supposed to; supposed to love your child and their messy scribbled drawings that show no form of talent nor skill. i am a bunch of small versions of myself, wounded children and battered adolescents hiding under a large trench coat, stumbling forward uncomfortably, façading as a fully formed adult

ultimately, i should be studying, but i am more interested in watching the sprinklers outside, how they hit the greenery and tall yellow flowers in a smooth oscillating staccato. i am more interested in gutting out the sorrows that lay dormant and gnawing in me, the ones that wake me in the night when i find my eyes are already wet with tears from my unconscious state. i am more interested in the goosebumps on my skin, the way the cool in heat is comforting like a blanket, unlike the depraved winter single digits of the north. more interested in my dry, cat-like tongue, textured and always yearning for more. always in a family that is not quite mine, the black spot in the album, awake and hiding in my room or any closest closed-off door—feet unsteady and reminding myself to stay quiet

and i awake each morning with the same sound stuck in my head;

you were born in fall, when things are meant to die