Brutal openness

"Please remember me....
....With maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention."

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I've always wondered what it'd feel like to be sucked into the black hole.

I've always imagined it'd feel like your feet were getting sucked out from your legs that were getting sucked out from your hip socket that was getting sucked out from your spine which was getting sucked out from your ribcage. And your lungs would collapse into your brains, but not before your heart stopped beating into a gaping, hollow void.

All that in a split second before you numbed and disintegrated into nothingness, and I think that I've always thought that the sensation, if dragged out into an extended period of time, would be similar to what I feel

now.

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I exist. Barely.

The folds of my sheets protect me late at night. They protect me in the early afternoon. They stroke my hair until I fall asleep at dawn to dream about things that jolt me awake four hours later.

I have no need for food. I don't feel much of anything, certainly not hunger.
The Kalahari sits in my eyes, hazy with the heat, dry and arid, immobile, save for small stirrings of reptiles buried deep in the sand.
Those stirrings, they remind me to blink. They remind me to breathe.

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I search for your words like a blind and starved man digs through garbage for food.
Not even words directed towards me, just any words from you to others. Just so I know that you're still there, maybe in polished condition, maybe in battered condition.

I drink them in, those words pouring over the cracks in my chest. I drink and I drink and
I thirst.

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My love, don't cry yourself to sleep.
You're still in every word I speak.