it’s cold out. i’m not too bothered by it. january is a cathartic month for me. it’s a bitter wind that cuts into my cheeks and draws tears from my eyes, it’s droplets clumping at the tips of my eyelashes and freezing there. it’s a soft, pillowy blanket weeping chunky flakes of white, sticking to my jacket and the collar of my sweater. it’s spindly inclusions that stretch upwards into navy, stipples of starlight that dwarf me in vastness. and it’s given me space to wonder about how i’m going to move forward.

almost a year now since i plummeted, and it's been a nearly impossible climb back to the top. i’m filling the timeline with new faces, but still, you’re there, the phantom of a past i’ll never escape. my obsession with you still spills over and pools in my subconscious and i wade in it, fervently, trying not to drown in the idea that i could ever make things go back to the way they were before. you hang your jacket beside mine on wednesday afternoons and i want to ask you why. you look so distant every monday and i almost feel guilty about it. i feel longing, i feel wayward, i feel like i did this i did this i did this when i know it's not true. i know you’re capable of paving your own path, but i almost don't want you to. i almost want you to need me. i almost wish that this lonely stance you’re taking was a precursor to our reunion, the promise of loyalty, a beacon of hope for the ending of this rift that seems to widen every time i look at you. but i know it’s all wrong, i know it’s not gonna do me any good to keep staring at the back of your head, begging it to turn around and face me once and for all.

i walked home the other night and kept going, all the way to the park, and i smoked two cigarettes and a joint and stumbled through inches of untouched snow. the flakes fell almost comically slow, like the weatherman cranked the dial of time all the way to the left. i snuffed one out on the tree i sobbed against last february when you called me and told me the scars on my arms made you cry. i stood there with the tree for a while, staring at it, wishing it could take me back in time to any moment before the one i was living in. it didn’t. i left it to stand there without me.

it’s demeaning to continue to let your existence control me like this. i’m a marionette, i’m a shadow on the wall, i’m still wound around your finger like the earth on its axis. i’m begging the universe to stop baiting me with easy ways back in, dangling you and your life in front of my face like a wriggly worm on a hook, just enough out of reach so i never get to touch it. i’m begging for anything. is anybody out there? is anybody listening? i’m learning to love the taste of cheap cigarettes on my lips, the numbness in my fingers, the pavement as it pushes against the soles of my feet. pushing, shoving, slamming into me repeatedly as i run, and run, and run far away from you every time my brain wanders too close. i can’t run fast enough. nothing’s really different now. how do i escape this pain if it’s all i’ve ever known?