It’s a shuddering kind of sickness
Your heart is being extracted from you through every pore
Out your arms and your fingers
Out your stomach out your thighs
These are the thoughts
‘Whoever the he in my life is
I will never be adequate for him’
Still…
Mother leaves a plate of chips on my table
Which I can’t eat right now
And you look forward to seeing your dad home from work tomorrow
A mother and a father, still alive, still together
That’s a lot more than most people have
Who may have boyfriends or an infinitude of friends
Still…
You remember the brown eyes
The silver eyes
The dark blue, the pale blue
All the eyes who you thought saw you
And turned away to other girls
Prettier
Still…
All those girls have their woes
And you cry for them too
The wrongdoings on those women you felt jealous of
Everybody is just on their own journey
You silently scream into the darkness
Hurting all alone
Still…
A friend texts to ask you to the cinema
And in comes the memory of another friend who you laughed and hugged on the street last night and people looked at you funny
The dancing lady who gave you a warm hug and was sorrowful to hear you are leaving
And yes you are leaving, all on your own as usual
To a not very nice place
But you see it as a step forward
A murky, muddied-skied step
You remember the softness of the grass and crunchy leaves under your feet earlier
The sounds of the birds
And the man on the bike who sang a few lines of the bob dylan song you were playing on your speaker
And then he told you a woman gave him shelter from a firestorm once
Your heart is always aching this time of year
When every woe becomes a melancholy cinematic show in your mind
Too much time to think
Memories and feelings fading into each other in perfect sequence
Further crumpling your sore heart
You never want to be with someone
You want to curl into your knees and be small
You feel silent tears drop to the stale bedsheets
You linger in the sore feeling
Hannah Fitzpatrick Creative 