grey slumber

something about this world is too solid. there’s not enough of the air that there once was before in this town, sharp and cold and full of something that could brush through your very eyebrows but not leave a trace. something about the sunlight screaming into my eyes is making me miss the soft warmth of your hands and the sweet bliss of autumn. summer in this place isn’t speaking a language that i know.

this year we’re all together again like we were before, hand in unlovable but never unloved hand, lonely and bored and older than we ever were in the city. five faceless friends once again. home is where the cracked brown leaves never change their colour and the songs never get better and our lives stay perfectly the same. we wanted this. we were looking for safety. but what they won’t tell you about safety is that it when it settles in, it leaves you with nothing but the biting urge to claw yourself out of your pretty flowerbed and get right back to whatever it was you were running from.

if you were born running, he told me, eyes brighter than the moon, you keep running. and when you stop? that’s the only part that feels dangerous. if you aren’t wiping the blood from your wounds then you’re nothing to anyone, and nothing to me, and no part of the grand stories. you vanish like the gentle dreams of a sinner. and when you fade, you fade faster than the ink on my hands that day when i wrote to somewhere else but still thought of you. you not as you are now but you as you will always be. that shard of something unbreakable forged in a memory i can no longer even see.

this is still a grand story. there is still a hero. you may not see it yet but the world hasn’t slowed down, not even for a minute, and the calm before the storm is always less calm than it seems. when the tide hits there’ll be nothing more than the colours you keep dreaming about, the places you can’t reach, and a future worth more than every broken memory put together. if you shake the kaleidoscope hard enough eventually something has to make sense. whole or otherwise.

if you see yourself in this it’s because you’re here. and you always were.

[Image: a rose. Source: Dani Relbyn. Used with permission.