Your teeth gently nibble at my thigh and the tender soft skin behind my ear and you
trace down my neck with your nectarine lips;

When I inhale you, you are cool and mysterious like the mornings the sun struggles to rise and you
committed to walking in the park with the vague fear that someone is watching you as your mismatched socks become wet with the dew of the grass. Exhale.

Your eyes weed through my words and expose me. But my secrets are no secret, and my future is only made of dried bones and the repeat button permanently pushed on track 8 of a CD you gave me before.

Yours is colorful and exciting, and you have things you want. You know how to want.

You have friends and people, houses and families, animals and creatures and mountain sunsets in your future. You have laughter and words and art. Paint and learning and stimulation and 70 more years. You have stamps to get in your passport, songs to sing in the shower (hot? cold?)

I am in the kitchen, listening to music I shouldn't be. I know that changing the song may literally save my life, but I do nothing.

It's not fair to let someone so alive love someone like me. Some people don't get to want things, and it's not just or right but, "Hey that's life!" croons the man with the leather coat and droopy shoulders, smelling like cigar smoke and whiskey, holding a sign (Anything Helps) on the street corner. Or was that the police man in the middle of the park, on the walk we took trying to figure out if holding hands still counts as too much love? Who knows?

Nothing is wrong.

It isn't. I'm fine. I eat food and I go to work and I come home and I get up and I eat food and I go to work and I come home and I get up and I eat food and I go to work and I come home and I get up and I eat food and I go.

I feel like whatever I'm making is a stall.

It is just not anything real.

I am floating and breathless, and anything but here. I am one step in, and one step out.

I am sitting in this apartment, and nothing feels real.

I want a day. One day. Where everything is vibrant and actually happening.

I would trade 60 years for this day. Ice cream, and the mountains, and
maybe a conversation with all of the people I love. Maybe 5 minutes. Maybe 15.

I would get up. Go for a bike ride. Read my favorite passages from my favorite books. Talk to my mom, talk to my dad. My grandma.

I would have blueberry pancakes. I would make my mom's recipe. I would play ball with the dog.

Why do I feel like I know a secret that no one else does? Why do I already feel like I am dust?

Why have I decided that whatever way the future goes, I cannot feel excited for it? Why do I feel like I'm going through the motions of what it means to be someone who is living?

I feel like I'm following a script, numbly smiling here or nodding there and why don't the things that made me happy only make me sad because here we are all I want to do is sleep.