Shelter’s Cost

Routine interactions

Intolerant tones

Scalding glances from everyday drones

Misunderstanding or direct condemnation?

Perceptive insight or gross fabrication?

Since asking is awkward

Truth isn’t allowed

Cycling thoughts

Wear anxiety’s shroud

Familiar

Wretched

And safe.

Stapled over my face is survival’s blank mask

Soul swept in a corner and taken to task

The point? The reason? The motive? The gain?

Why are we here? Can we ever explain?

Waning persistence

A waxing shockwave

Solace served cold in a fear-fashioned grave

Hopeless

Lonesome

And safe.

Unreal

Please go away please go away please just go the fuck away. It’s too  painful. It's not about you. No. Not you. I just...

I don’t know. Please. Please. I just need to be alone.

The words sit inside me—searing, stifling molten copper. I try to hear him, try to bring the right response from the smoky depths. A shrug, a nod, a single, hollow word—each an echo in the barrenness.

Goddamit! 
I’ve done everything right. All the things I was supposed to do. Years of therapy. Medication. Reams of journaling. Meditation. . Revelations and grief. Restlessness and rage. Over and over and over and over. Pulling myself out, All those times I came so close— 

So close

—and pulled myself from the brink.

Dropping the bag of pills

Steadying the steering wheel

Gripping my phone as if that slender connection to the world could save me

But always, unable to make a call...

“Sorry. What did you say?”

He cuts another a bite of cold, leftover pork chop while swallowing the bite already in his mouth. “I said tomorrow’s that dinner meeting.”

Meeting. Dinner. Work. Not me.

“They’re talking about moving it from that place we always go. It’s getting more and more expensive and the service isn’t that great. So we’re meeting at…”

So close… so many times I've come within a breath of oblivion. And then, somehow, stepped right back into my life. So glad I didn’t go through with it. So glad I managed to survive, once again. So astonished at how close I came—at how that storm can build and grow and take over everything.
           Even now.
           After all the work I’ve done. With all the tools I hold. All the forgiveness I’ve managed. All the letting go and exquisite release. Even now, it can rise up and threaten to swallow me whole. The desperation. The excruciating hopelessness. The cold, dense fog that spreads over everything, drowning perception, blighting reason....

“…so, it’s good the baby’s coming now—”

“Baby?”

For a moment, he sees me.
Really sees me. 
“You okay?”

“Yeah. Fine. I just missed what you said.”

“My partner’s wife is in labor." He watches me for another moment, a bite sitting unchewed in his mouth, his knife poised to make another cut. "I’ve been talking about it for a while.”

“Sorry. I heard you talking about the call schedule, and the person in ICU but I missed the mention of the baby. Isn’t this early?”

He chews. Swallows. Cuts another bite. “Yes. The baby was supposed to come around Christmas, but this is going to make it easier. He’ll take some time off, but at least it won’t screw up the Christmas call schedule.”
The call schedule. That's what's important here. 

“Yeah. That’s good.”

I push a few grains of cold fried rice around with my fork. Force another mouthful. Wash down the salty blandness with tepid water. It’s almost tolerable.

Almost.

I carry the bowl to the sink. Run the rest down the drain. Give my thoughts a sharp slap.

Jesus. He comes home for lunch and all I do is grit my teeth and wish he'd go?
And another.
What the fuck is wrong with me? Jesus-fucking-christ what’s the point? What’s the  fucking point of any of this? Is this good for him? I’m not even here. I’m not real at all. Have I ever been real?

No one sees me... 

No one hears me...

and I hear no one....

He heads back to work.

I cancel the appointment with my therapist. Hold my isolation close. Count the hours until I have to pretend again. I write. Worthless words on a virtual page. Silently, I read them over. Backspace. Rewrite. Insignificant thoughts expressed to no one. I turn them over, immerse myself in their intricate beauty, and then discard them line by line because I know—

I know

—there is something I could be doing—

SHOULD be doing

—but I choose poorly. The wrong thoughts. The wrong words. The wrong actions. Over and over. Line by line. Pointless, useless, worthless, wrong. I stare at the words until I can’t anymore and then head into the orange glow of dwindling daylight. My footprints strike a line across the heavily frosted ground while the white vapor of my breath billows and dissipates. Tiny clouds. Fragile and fleeting, but proof, none-the-less.   I am real. I am here. For this moment, for what it's worth, I exist. 

Summer-Blue

Small and new to the world, she looked up and found that the sky was summer-blue. The brilliance of it took her breath away. 

Such a vibrant, living sky! 

She stared at it with wonder, knowing this was where she was meant to be. All day she played in the azure glow.

And then it was night and the sky grew cold and black. 

She went inside and closed the door against the longing, mourning the summer-blue.

A little bigger and a little less new, she opened the door. She took just one step beyond the door, but nowhere was the summer-blue. A vast storm covered the world, horizon to horizon.

Gray and swirling.

Anger rumbling.

A flash of terror!

She slammed the door.

But she remembered the summer-blue.

In dreams and reverie, the warm memory of the azure glow ached inside her.  She pushed it aside, aside, aside and then, one day, she opened the door again. She wasn't so brave as to step outside, but even from the doorway she saw no summer-blue. Instead, the sky was dressed in white, attended by a frigid wind. Snow swirled and blew so hard she could barely close the door to its frantic appeal.

This time she shuttered the windows, closing herself more securely in her safe little room. She painted the ceiling blue. This is the sky, she told herself. Here, it will never change. I will always be safe.

She closed her eyes and waited for the warmth of that still-remembered glow. When it didn't come, she became one with the ache and told herself there was nothing beyond the door.

She became an adult within the shuttered windows and a closed door. Even as the seasons passed, she was safe. Even as her inner sky yellowed and pealed around the edges, she was safe. Even as the longing grew, she was safe.

And desperately miserable.

And wondered why?

Wasn't her inner sky every bit as good as that distant memory?
Didn't she have everything she required to survive?

Wasn't this room with its perfectly shuttered windows and impenetrable door exactly what she needed?

“Outside isn’t safe,” she told herself. “I have blue right here. Right here in my safe little room.”

She scowled at the dull and lifeless ceiling and then at her own reflection growing 

Anger

Longing

Despair

And it filled her up and her misery grew and finally she said, “Fine!" She flung the door wide and stepped through her fear, through her gritted teeth, through her resolve. She walked through the cold and through the darkness and through the constant barrage of her own misleading mind and then she saw it.
Had it been there all along?
The sky was summer-blue. And she remembered 

Light

Warmth

Life

And fear.
Fear was the illusion that kept her safe and she was so afraid to see. Too afraid to know know the summer-blue. For knowing it was to risk a return of the cold and the dark and the painful wind.

She returned to her safe little room and closed the door, falling deep into her delusion of safety in the one place where nothing would ever truly be safe... in her own private and unidentified hell.