THIS IS IMPORTANT.

because you'll curve your lips into a smile
and blindly accept the crooked tasks
of the woman whose back curls over
as she takes the graveyard shift
that cannot be heard beyond the walls
of her home.
but cursed be the man who walks as the mother
and scorned be the woman who isn't a father.

scratches

The same rain pats my head and I slip my feet into the same rubber boots and the rooms smell the same - the exact same, almost eerily so - and the trees are all the same different fall-appropriate pigment. I'm chasing for hours in the future. This place is the lover I never could quite love. This place is the exact same place it was ten months ago. This static backdrop allows us to see how we (as the dynamic characters) have changed. I'm not in love. I'm not ready to leave my body. I'm not thinking about you and only you constantly. My thoughts have become scattered images I cannot trace with exact clarity. I'm alright; I'm quite alright.

I love this place, just not enough. I love these people, but I cannot stay. I'd like those thirteen hours back although they've rotted more terribly than the seconds that expire with each word I type. Gone, gone...gone.

I never could quite love this place.
This was the second chance.
I know this because I could not love this place even without the burden of begging for your affection.

How could I lose you? How did it happen faster than the time we lost so quickly? You were a silent goodbye I was not ready for. But I'm quite alright. I'm not ashamed for a lack of sadness.

It's difficult to trace the contours of each dead hour, trying to grasp them by the tail before they flee for good. Could we chase those hours forward? Of chips and salsa, of Pad Thai, of planning, of not planning, of haze, of talking (about anything), of curly hair, of little touches and bigger giggles, of no goodbye. Of rotting these hours to the core, leaving nothing for now and room for the future.

I fall in love for a day and he'll turn to you. I exit the scene with my back to the light because no love song is sweeter than the way the darkness embraces me, a faithful caress.

The immediate world that surrounds me will turn to a bleaker angle, and I'll be trapped inside a dark dimension for a thirty hours. After crawling out of a bad day, I'll scratch words into an acid-free notebook - I'll assemble all the thoughts and ideas and emotions relevant to the situation just to establish significance and validity from the darkness. But the ink is perishable, and the meaning I have just constructed will be useless and outdated within four seconds. And once it's over, I'll have to reboot the system and fall into a similar darkness and fabricate similar meanings and experience similar expirations. The rounds repeat until the forecast integrates itself into the realm of nothingness and I become nothing more than weak and tired and unable.