akaCLL

Loneliness.

Where the doves refuse to land and where your hand, extended, cups around nothingness.



I hear the piano played from beyond my window. The neighbourhood has been cast in night but each note fills and wanes, and I am made aware of my solitary outline, listening in to another life.
I thought I could meet it halfway, my solitude. I thought I'd come to terms with it being simply the way it is; a default, an origin, as well as destiny predetermined. Have braced myself for the impact of concrete on my falling, for exclamations only I would hear, and most times it passes by without as much as a whimper and a gathering of my parts in a determination that "this is just how it is". So my threads learn to intertwine around each other and convince themselves that they are all they need.

But around each corner there stands a figure that changes form every time, and I barely recognise it until it makes me realise my soles pressed to the cold floor, and only air against my back. It stays and lingers, pretends to disappear only to resurface again. I wonder what it looks for. So transient a thing yet so immense a consequence, for under its weight my convictions unravel. And the work I've attempted at reconciling my flesh to my own frame, and not to yearn to sink into somebody else's, becomes futile. The re-emerging terror plays hopscotch on the knots I've tied and picks at the threads so they begin to fray, draws circles on my empty patches. So I play the game and hug my knees, hoping to appease hope.

Thank you Gary for the prompt. xx