The knot of your absence tightens, pulling and squeezing my flesh, stealing my ability for a fresh
breath. I wring my eyes for tears: a way to loosen the knot. But I fail to realize they are foreign
to the routes of the clump they are so well tangled in; the droplets that do reach the brim of my
eyes are infused, with the suppressed cacophony of my melancholy— Stinging the creaky door
to my soul, snatching my escape from this forever pulling knot. And in this state of desperation,
and confusion, forms in my eyes a play:
The spotlight on a figure too similar to you. A gash drawn on your palm. You wince wiping the
salve. Your eyes squint to mark the severity. Perhaps you realize it’s bearable; picking up the
quill, you bring your wrist down to the parchment. Few syllables later, the quill is set on the
table. Face in a frown, you graze the wound.
For I cannot watch no more, I walk over.
“what has happened?” I barely ask,
And then you:
“Oh it’s nothing. A slight cut from cooking, that’s all.”
“a slight cut? I’m sorry, where has your intellect gone? Work you have! Letters to write! And
this— oh, just could you be a drop more unmindful? For you are bleeding —“
I holler, hoping in the depths of my heart you know for this is merely how I care.
You say something, but before the words reach my ears the curtains are drawn. The memory
fades and I am forced to grieve the simple past in this desolate present.
I blink, as reality becomes clear. And a sharp sting stabs through where my heart is supposed to
be, and my only sedative, remedy lies in the rise and fall of your voice— whose shadow I
recognize, pushing my arm forward to grasp any drop of the only elixir I have. My fingers graze
against the warmth, just for a second— a minute moment making the knot loosen just an inch.
But you take a step forward, barely an increment, but for the state I am put in it seems as
though a leap across time— and the tiny graze is gone and the knot tightens and throttles
what’s left of my sanity, but you’re too far and the carcass of hope— which had once so gently
held my bones together, now cracked each marrow with ease—
and—
And I can’t breathe–
I slip into a dream. A kitten spotted with the richest soil on the purest white canvas. Glimmering
green eyes, shining like jade pools in the light. Beautiful I think. Her emerald stones close ever
so gracefully, sheltering for sleep.
“Honey?” a hoarse voice in the distance.
She mews sweetly, suiting the name.
“Honey!” the voice calls again.
… Heartbeats pass.
“Ah! There you are! What—what are you doing?”
Obviously fatigued, the sleepy kitten purrs.
“You are sleeping? Alright, rest.”
The voice fades. And my eyelids flutter open. It takes me a few moments to perceive the woeful
air around me, having just wakened from euphoria.
“Why do you do this to me? Knock on the door to my conscience with the blissful memories?
This is stabbing enough as it is.”
A chamber in my heart whispers—
As the suffocating stench of my anguish filled reality pounces on me— causing me to choke on
this infuriating rage of you being out of my reach, and I miss you, oh heaven of gods! This
longing I feel is as dense as the heaviest of celestial bodies itself.
My mind spins at the measure of the distance between us; the knot pulls on my insides and
clots my blood—I reach my trigger. I retch out the bloody, ugly knot out in a jumbled mess of
entwined emotions of anger and sadness on my loved ones.
And the knot sits back, relaxes, and watches as the guilt and self-hatred consume and weave its
own parasitic knot in place of the old, ugly clump. The clump which I shed my blood to get rid
off. It sows back. Weighing me down, stopping me from reaching you, acting as my moat
against happiness.
So, without a choice, I watch your shadow slowly slip out of view with a tear rolling down my
chin. Where my only serenity was the picture the shadow painted. And for now and eternity I
bleed in frozen agony on the same soil your silhouette once embraced.
