The Darkest Blues

The days are so short now, they end so suddenly and the sun just sinks in the sky. The slow, sparkling summer sunsets are soon to be only a memory. The cold is already creeping in, callous and crisp. I am already dreading waking up and stepping out onto a frozen floor, my feet cringing. My only consolation lies in the snow, the perfect white sheets of frost which cover the ground, the windows. And in the fall leaves which are still shifting, still clinging to skinny branches, still holding onto the last bits of green.

Today the sky was crystal blue with little scattered specks of clouds. I woke up cold from terrible nightmares. They were vivid and graphic and violent. It is hard for me to think of them. I am trying to forget them. People are out in the streets tonight; I can hear them, drunkenly spewing undirected obscenities. They are often there, beneath me, making a ruckus, running amok and screaming threats at one another. I try to ignore them but I often must hear their shouting matches and their words shake the air.

I am home alone, something that happens rarely with roommates. And I often yearn to be alone with my thoughts, to let them simmer and shatter and slide around without any outside influences. But, each time I find myself alone I stare blankly into the darkness and I fill with a vague fear, an undefined sadness. I look out into the emptiness and into the artifically lit street and I feel the weight of all that needs to be done, of all that needs to be written. I stare out from eyes which do not feel like mine. And there is a silence somewhere that should be filled with words.

Life sometimes passes over me like a shadow, unfelt, barely seen. I sit here, soaking myself in the words I speak, in the words I cannot speak. I attempt to articulate something serious, something worthy of even my own re-reading. The ghosts of my past gather around me. They stare in silence; they wait for me. And I am always grasping for air, struggling to see what lies before me. I am always caught between the layers of the years I have lived. I am always calculating the worth of each day. I weigh out the words I have written and I judge them; I am them. Even now, I am looking at the paragraphs before this one, wondering if once tomorrow arrives, if I will feel like today was a day well-lived.

I have squirmed inside a sickness which is only just now subsiding. This week has been merely a mirage. I have watched things happen and I have not felt that I was the one they were happening to. But, I have also been overwhelmed by the same feelings I have always felt, the same feelings which never leave but which fester and glow inside me. I hold them there and I could not let go if I tried. Everything that happens to me happens to me so wholly that I can only stand back and watch it. I hide inside myself, inside my memories, inside the reflected images of the things I think of doing.

I want to move through a foreign landscape; I want to speak in another tongue. I want to build a thousand new memories to quiet the things I see everyday. All of the places here are coated in all the things that happened before. The old associations haunt my present. I can never figure how what to let go of and what to keep tight against my chest. I am always searching for a change in the people I know. I am always searching for a change in myself, a change I constantly try to encourage. I am losing the things I am trying to say.