The Streets Are Cold

And the streets are cold, and the streets are empty.

And through you wander.

Where are the words to describe the scene? Fleeting out of view, out of grasp, flittering through your fingers, twirling around your knuckles, disappearing into the sky. How can you describe the world around you? You think of one: cold. 

It’s cold. And it is empty.

And through you wander.

Your life has always been something cold. It might be why you can find this singular word so easily. Carved into your brain, a ridge sits, and within it sits walls of ice, and shards, and false whispers made by mothers who were never fully able to hide their hatred of you, and right in the middle of it is what you stole from your dad. Right in the middle of it, hidden between the ribs, taken and stolen and cherished and loved, is the only warmth you know, some sort of flame that's breathing inside a shell of ice, a shell of cold, some sort of macabre protection right in the middle of you brain-rib-body combo, and it's fucked up. It’s fucked up because you killed him, or you didn’t, or you did and you’re just living with it, or maybe you’ve been told you did and you’re living with that too. 

Living with yourself.

There are words to use. You can describe your feet, muted by the thin blanket of snow that covers the leaves that cover the city sidewalks, or you can describe your nose, running and snotty and bloody, trailing over your lip and into your mouth, or even the way the sky looks; dark-black-inky-dim-and-ruinous, lit up by a moon not larger than a nail, lit up by the city lights stretching up, crooked like broken fingers.

There are words to use.

And you trail forward, over and over again, through the city. 

It is time for you to sleep now, but there is no way to sleep when your chest is hollow.

There is no way to sleep when there’s a hole where your heart is. 

When your heart is tucked away in your brain and no ax can break-in

You cannot be older than nineteen; even with the tired look in your eyes, even with the way each of your steps clomps down like a titan carrying the world, you cannot be older than nineteen.

Being nineteen has not been kind to you, and you cannot describe your world, nor your love, nor your family or the way you want to live; what you can describe is this: the blood under your nose, the rings that twist and carve into your finger, and you can describe how your chest is empty.

The streets are cold. You cannot say more.

Soon, they will be warm.

You can wait. 

You can wait.