The Discovery of a Void (And Its Eventual Acceptance)

Written earlier this week...


I am on an endless search for substance.

Something tangible that I can wrap myself around.

And every time I think I’ve found it,

my fingers part their separate ways

and I watch as the little bits of concrete certainty

slide from my grasp.

I always put my hope in the wrong things.

I rip my faith apart at its seams

and release all the little pieces into

winds that float on dark horizons

and I pray that God will find them in them morning

and return along with them

the emotions that I’ve lost.

Emotions that have been consumed by

a complete inability to translate them

into words that hold any value.

It’s almost like I’m screaming

but you can’t hear me.

Either I’m not loud enough or

you’ve turned deaf ears and blind eyes to me,

anything to bury me six feet below your realities.

I’ve lost all my friends to either

distance or distrust.

I’ve tried to keep people from turning into shadows.

I always fail.

The blades of their tongues

always cut the arch of my back

leaving me to rebuild on top of old scars every time.

And they disappear while I’m tending to my wounds.

But everyone always leaves behind their pictures,

photographs of me and them smiling into lenses that know nothing of our fate.

I wonder is this how everything ends,

in two dimensions

that fail to mention

that once our lucks and dooms were

intertwined and connected

so much that when I inhaled

your lungs dispersed my oxygen back out into our atmosphere.

I always trust that everyone will be there.

But all these expectations soon find their way to empty promises.

Empty promises that carve out voids beneath my skin

and wait to be discovered.

I struggle.

But I make companions of my empty spaces.

I crave their solitude.

These detections of holes within my soul are

a confirmation of my fears.

Proof that even with them here,

I still exist.