Since she was a child, she saw colors in sounds

and felt the way you'd pronounce a word with her fingers.

Her feet were in the sea and her hands in the trees,

Anchors, reassuring. Solid bits to tie the drifting veils in her head to.

Bugs and plants and wind and dirt kept her sane and satisfied

far past what any person seemed to be able to.

She'd walk with them and smile, sincerely enjoying her time with peers,

but the thought of a home at the bottom of the ocean,

of existence as an everlasting patch of sand

was what really set her heart on fire,

what brought her to life.

There was an untouchable, indescribably profound piece of sadness

in the very heart of anything she'd do,

after she realized that's not how the real world works,

rising up from pits in her stomach to reach around and wind tight knots

in her throat and mind and breath.

Slowly she choked on this sentiment until the colors stopped pouring from her.

Though they stayed as tints and shades

rippling in her muscles when she ran,

pooling calmly in her heels when she came to rest in a spot of sun

quiet and kind.

A fanciful phrase from a friend or a story will slosh the hues

against the walls of her mind, set her off again,

tilting toward a horizon she knows doesn't exist,

but is still worth reaching for.

I hope that when you hear someone passing by

mention me,

you feel like you've just missed me,

as if I was across the hall and had left

before you'd gotten up to come find me.

Do not attempt to tiptoe past my door

and do not smile and wave hello

when I finally do catch you.

It's wise to wait until you're safe

and warm in your bed

before you open your eyes and sigh sweet relief.

I stay up because sleeping is accepting defeat one more time.

There's a gray curtain I can't find a way to open

and it's making me heavy and itch when I breathe.

How do I show you everything I mean without telling you first

so that I don't scare you too much?

I stop the cycle before it starts and I'm imagining shadows

and there's no real end to this knotted clump of string,

but picking at it feels better than just holding the heft of it in my pocket or palm.

Stop. stop stop find a better path. nice better well good. It's too much difficult

my head is cotton you're too much to handle I don't want to go here let me go

stop you're hurting me no I don't mean it yes of course what do you mean

when I say I want many different things from you I don't have any right asking for.

I'm too tired to sleep.

I had assumed we'd all picked our separate corners

and that was where we'd spend our time,

but it turns out there's a whole world to be seen

when you turn around.

And I never even noticed.

It seems daft, now. Now I know those long hours

that held hands to form years could have belonged to me,

rather than the corner. Minutes would tick and I'd form a blind contour,

following cracks and chips of paint with my fingers and eyes.

I thought if I scratched at them hard enough, I'd eventually get through to

wherever it was I wanted to go.

But two hands worth of bloody fingernails didn't earn me

what simply turning around would have.

An escape? I don't know that it would have been, to me.

I feel I would have taken one glance at that open rolling picture

and found a vicious fear had seized me, and that

I would have never opened my eyes again.

For all the words I have found to describe what it is I'm looking for,

I have found more numerous still those that would tell you why I have not

run to go and find it.

I am reflected in each person I see. I will always make you a part of me,

and it is less and less through a conscious effort that I achieve such aims,

and is now a reflex, holding that duality of self in my head.

You're so natural, the contours of your mind

settling and locking into the grooves of my own,

meshing and folding into an entirely different landscape

that is still somehow distinguishable as two separate halves.

Though I feel if I were to fall into a hole and die, or be carried away by a swift storm,

you would begin to fade too.

You wouldn't be able to stop it, and you might not realize what was happening,

might not perceive how deeply scarred you were,

but you would fade all the same.

Slowly and in small pieces you'd let yourself fall away from the vigor of living.

It is wrong to derive any spark of something hopeful from such a drastic picture,

but I can't help it. The ferocity that I have yet to fully unearth within myself,

with which I believe in the above, is what drives me further forward.

Without that focal thought to build around,

a structure so sound,

There would be just a shell of me.

I find no higher truth than you.

It's the moment when you look down and see footprints overlapping,

bringing you back to a place you never knew you wanted to be in,

that you begin to get an idea of how lost you are.

Sometimes you're lucky, and you realize what or who it is you were looking to find

right then and there, and you begin to set on a new path, solid and sure in your step.

But most often, you'll lift your head and look every which way,

sure you were meant to go left, while someone is pulling the string in you chest to the right,

and you'll find yourself even more puzzled than before.

No one tells you their names, and you're the last to know what is the task at hand.

So rather than attempt to entrench yourself in the present matter,

you keep walking forward, head down and heart set.

You'll only end up back where you started,

but there's a certain comfort to never really knowing where you belong,

rather than staying put and seeing you could have been stuck in a place you know you shouldn't be.

She's allowed to say the things I've so dearly wanted to plainly state

for such a long time.

The weight with which she throws around her words

is incomparable to that of mine.

If I were to utter the same phrase,

the world we've so carefully constructed together might crumble, indefinitely.

I have to avoid that at all costs, as it's the only home I really know.

We worked so hard towards that end, and for so long.

Give yourself some credit, this victory required a lot of subtle work.

But let me tell you a secret:

Soon, I'm going to ruin it. I'm sorry.

I love you.