Pour toi.

Five months.


Has it really only been five months?
Five months since I saw you that way for the first time, five months since I left you that way for the first time. Five months and we've already been further than Columbus could ever have hoped to go.

You say we have yet to travel the world, to go places together, to see things.
It's not true.
I've seen mountains and seas, sunsets and sunrises through my dusty windows. I've seen millions of people, read millions of words, cried millions of tears, thought millions of thoughts.
I fall asleep every night and wake up every morning and have traveled thousands and thousands of miles, and I have never, for a single second, left your side.
You've never left mine.

Maybe when I come back we'll both be old, skin sagging from the weight of our sleepless nights and wrinkles etched into our faces from the hours we've spent smiling while straining.
And if we both died tomorrow, bones crumbling prematurely from holding each other up, it would be okay. I wouldn't be sad.

Because five months with you is worth a lifetime.

Hello, solitude.

Days spent buried
in the room, in my bed, in my head, it hardly matters where I hide.
It's dark even when the sun shines, especially when the sun shines.

I feel it through the autumn winds, the slow-setting breath of solitude inching its way down my back,
stripping trust from the deeper layers of my skin, stripping warmth.

I feel the onset of more sleepless nights to come, more restless wandering,
more half-smoked packs, half-finished paintings, cups of cold coffee sitting on my desk, waiting for the dusk to turn into dawn, waiting for empty hands, empty souls
to wash out the dregs.

Sometimes, I remember you.

"Penniless and tired with your hair grown long
I was looking at you there and your face looked wrong


Memory is a fickle siren song..."

Cities.

They're romantic until they're lived in. Well-lit from far away.

Live in one, and you no longer matter. It swallows you whole and spits you back out on its grimy streets. It strips away your layers until you're just a small, insignificant part of a whole. Part of a whole that will never really need you.

People no longer write but to speak of decadence in them, these cities. Youth, excitement, glamour. Money. Growth growth growth, always growth, always growing, and it's never enough. Growing on the outside.
Inside, it's all dead.

There is beauty in lackluster grit. But oh, that lackluster grit, how it wears me down.

----

I want to sleep by the water and sand it away, this shell,
the one I sleep in and awaken in and breathe in.

I want to bathe in the rays of the moon, the ones only seen when there are no lights to compete with it, no buildings to obscure the view. No death to taint my livelihood.
No cage for my spirit. No more iron bars.

I need to find to find the ocean soon,
to know I'm not the only one.

Endless summer.

The sun doesn't sleep on this side of the world.

Fire.
Fire through my windows in the morning, fire through my eyelids in the afternoon, burning,
reminding me that there is no rest. There is never any rest.

I get on my knees at night and beg for rain. I beg for the color gray,
gray like the dinner dress draped across my lanky bones. Gray like the color I pull over my head before I go to sleep.
Gray hangs on my walls. It buries itself in the musty folds of my curtains.
It wraps itself around my waist.
I wear it well.

I'll hide some in my closet, in my drawers. I'll collect it until the day I have enough.
Enough to douse the angry flames in the sky,
to paint clouds, to paint fog, to paint rain.


And I will sleep.

Filler text.

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Hard days and even harder nights.

Sometimes, they marvel, half in admiration, half in disbelief that I would do something like this. Sometimes, they try to understand. But there are some things you couldn't begin to understand. No. Not unless you've been through it.
Sometimes, they think I'm stupid. I know they think I'm stupid.


But everyone's stupid about some things, and if there's anything I don't mind so much being stupid about, it's for being in love. 
Not that unrequited stuff, nor the silly, ungrounded infatuations of the youth. Things like that don't last the storm, and this is a tempest. 


My god, is it a tempest.


But the thing about tempests is that once you've beaten past it, hands blistered from fighting the current with your oars, face wind-chapped, body drained from swimming for days, and you're crawling back onto shore crushed to a pulp but not defeated,

nothing else will ever seem quite so difficult anymore.