The snow descends, an accumulation of felted veils, and more than enough of it whitens and quilts the ground to where it prompts me to think, simply, Merry day. What a merry day it must have been for each deserving person bundled up in love.

A gnarled tree outside my window sways with the wind, and I ponder how it watched us, Cait and I, a bystander to our unraveling: beaming to dwindling—her love like soft rain, mine like excess stormwater—until I pulled back, severed from corrupted files, as dead-eyed as I am unworthy.

She should be ebullient in December—she, the little girl in me, with many heads, and many words unsaid, all of which are bubbling and vehement. The truth is that she cannot be placated by what the present me tells herself. She knows it matters not. The end of the year will approach nonetheless, for time doesn’t wait, and I should never expect change to materialize out of thin air.

The moon shimmers as it used to, eternally watchful, albeit I take it as an apology in vain. My dreams are like obscure stars, illuminated to me so warmly. Sweetened by wonder, ubiquity, and infinite distance, they are untouchable. They are constellations, they are lovely in theory, they are not mine to seize; they are unoriginal, and utterly pointless in practice—

The moon shivers under the gaze of a wistful sky, eternally present, partially unseen. The moon, in its lonesome, never appears to shine. The moon, aglow on account of borrowed light, trembles with the remembrance it carries for me. The moon looks as it used to. 

I’ve embodied it, I suppose. In more ways than one, I have come to embody everything I claimed to abhor. A glimpse is only scratching the surface of lunar regolith.

When today ends in four odd hours, it’ll mark twenty-three days left until Christmas comes, belly-up on tenterhooks. It logically shouldn’t be, though. There’s no point in expecting the once-in-a-blue-moon solace. There’s no point in chasing the scent of ghosts. There’s no point. There’s no—

Body aching along with my mind, the abiding in-between, I peel my eyes away from the orange Post-it notes pinned to the cork board and stand, pencil clenched way too tight in my palms, forcing it into an in-between of its own. Futile anchor. Futile hand. The weight does little to soothe. I’m not sure why I expected it to; the moon does not deserve the agency to expect. (Or change. Or love.)

Unseen, I shiver under the gaze of another frigid night on my self-inflicted lonesome and write on the notebook laid bare on the desk—hunched over, shoulders taut—the word 'breathe.' For each inhale, each exhale, I count. For each inhale, each exhale, the wire of my composure seems to further bend, one misstep threatening to ignite a spark. 

Nothing happens, and the pause itself burns deeper than any spark could, searing through my arteries. The meager expectation, too. The restless churn within, and the urgent need to move. To do something. Anything but this.

Cursing under my breath, I end up pacing the length of the hallway for what might as well be an eternity until my heels begin to ache as much as my mind and the rest of my body. The moon does not know what it’s good for. The moon sings a lullaby it cannot hear, and does not dare cradle the night it hums in longing to, for fear of consuming totalities. (The moon is a coward. The moon is a killer, brandishing its own crescent wounds, feasting on shadows casted upon itself.)

A rush of tears spring to my eyes before I’m able to get a hold of myself, and just won’t stop falling, and falling, and falling, even as I slide my promise ring up and down my finger, back and forth and then back again, as though I’m measuring unsweetened distance.

I don’t register that I’ve stumbled into the kitchen until the snow descending outside the window captures the fullness of my attention, and everything hushes. My body works on a mix of instinct and autopilot, then. All thoughts quiet. In seconds, there is only movement, and fact, and sound while I warm the kettle for two.

One for me, and one for Cait, who had pleaded so wistfully. Let’s call it a day, she told me, doleful and in love. We can call it a bad hour. We’ll get through this, but I need to take a walk, like usual. Is that okay? Good. I’m not mad at you, either. Just the hesitance to commit when we’ve come so far together. You need to meet me halfway, Bunny; I can’t carry it all.

As if on cue, my phone buzzes from my (our) nightstand, a reverberating sign, and I pad into the bedroom, rubbing my eyes and sighing in relief at the blurred words shimmering across the screen.

Lynnie ⛄️: im omw home now <3

After the kettle has boiled and the Earl Grey tea is brewed, I place two steaming mugs on the table and hope, silently but profusely, that Cait won’t take it as an apology in vain. 

There is nothing I could say to make the truth hurt less, let alone make the hurt stop. The grief I harbor for myself, the grief I harbor for the past, is not mine alone to carry. And it saddens me to think that it should be. And there are more days to come, I know, but there are also moments that feel concluding. Rightfully. Wrongfully. 

I cannot forgive myself for forgetting, nor for believing this, too, will end. My heart, my soul, and my love—they’re just about anything, except for abundances. Cait unmistakably contains multitudes, I unmistakably contain singularities. 

After I decide to merely heart her message, I try to focus on breathing methodically, the constant of my ring clinking against my hand-painted mug a soft metronome. Steady reminder. Steady chime. The twin candles Cait lit an hour before our fight sustain the ceiling fan’s lazy swirl, and I will sustain against all thought spirals. 

The tea I made for her, hand-steeped with care, remains untouched for just a little longer; by the time she’s inside, hung her snowy coat along with the two dog leashes, and kicked off her boots, I imagine it’s grown lukewarm.

Still, she drinks it. 

* * * 

The devil doesn’t hit his second stride.

When I wake in the morning, I don’t imagine my distorted image inside the picture frames lining the walls, and I don’t allow myself to deteriorate under any pressure.

The notebook still waiting on the desk isn’t as unbearable to look at, thank God. (It’s vivid, for once. Not the moment, but the notion itself, the fact that even expressing myself on paper doesn’t satisfy me. It will never not be like that, I think. If the worst comes to worst, maybe. Like dragging a mirror behind me, checking it against every other reflection possible, convinced mine is warped, wrong. Like polishing the self it shows me until hands are bleeding and hearts are as shattered as glass.)

It’s a new dawn, a new day, and I’ll be able to write sooner or later. I’m breathing, as well. Alive and awake.

These affirmations become a soundless mantra to me, and recede into the background when the bed dips, Cait’s ice-cold hands finding my waist like second nature. "Morning," she whispers in my ear, provoking the hairs on my neck to raise, a hymn to the morning sun. "I still love you. Always will."

"But do you forgive—"

"It’s not a matter of forgiving right now, Vi. It’s a matter of doing."

* * *

The second my writer’s block is lifted, I become frantic, in a way. By the third day, there are Post-it notes atop of Post-it notes, and I cannot find it in myself to care. I spend hours on end seeking for the right words. 

(Cait, bless her heart, doesn’t make a fuss, though she does raise an eyebrow before lingering with a sedulous massage to my tense muscles, mapping the tiny craters of stress beneath her palms.) 

Written in pen, the page smudged with tears and blotches of ink:

I wasn’t lying when I said that you’d wake up, too. My love, say a prayer under your breath, 'May the future be bright'—and I’ll say, 'May the past be unearthed'—and the little girl in me will say, 'May the present be worth it.'

I quite like myself when I smile fearlessly, eyes so full of mirth, cheeks warmed and my face blushingly happy, but I’m not sure the path to get there, or to get safely back. 

Tucked under my fluffed-up pillow, crumpled and hidden, nearly buried not by choice but by circumstance: 

I expected to be more, is the thing.

If nothing else, I expected that, after spending years driving recklessly into fog—open doors, shut doors, revolving doors—the camouflaged hope in the vast unknown would become clear to me and me only, for I was the one behind the wheel.

I would notice it. Brazen, dome-shaped, adamant. l'd dust off the snow shrouding my heart, which dismissed my yearning for ease, and allow that deliberate act to feel final, but non-performative.

In the distant past, l'd look ahead and think of tomorrow, not where l'd be in five, ten, fifteen years. I’d think of what wish I ought to make at 3:33. 

Unfortunately, my perspective of this universe carries no weight in all comparisons. I didn't expect l'd become desperate enough to feel that I turn to minimizing sadness and passivity more often than not, and yet.

Here I am, here I'll be, and here, nothing—and everything—matters. Here I am, molding the silence my limbs have been tangled up in until it becomes my own personal listener.

Here I go again, rambling even as the darkness keens over my body, plants open-mouth kisses along my jaw, as black as pitch.

'Truly, each and everything,' I confess to it, 'is haunted by grief, by fear. The waking, the rising.'

Slipped into the one hundred fifth page of a book, pressed like a flower betwixt the end of one chapter and the start of another:

If I were to think of hope as a grace period, the ski lodge, I'd be more likely to believe in it—pliant, quite erroneous all the same. But it wouldn't be shaped like the truth: an outline, an afterimage. Not now, nor in a few years' time.

To speak of solitude and vulnerability is to present oneself as prey. Weak, passive. And to think of the ski lodge as a grace period, not the grace period, is harrowing at best. The irony isn't lost on me. Even when I branch out, I don't trust that happiness will last. It's not something I know how to keep.

No matter what I see the ski lodge as, the warmth and the amenities it offers aren't things I deserve. I will never make it there with anyone. I know this; likewise, those around me have waited on enough pins and needles, cracked enough eggshells, to start expecting this.

Dancing around the topic of my inability to sustain much of anything has only led to me no longer pleading with zen’s shoulder, zen’s freckled horizon, zen itself. 'Take me there,' I used to beg. 'Keep the illusion alive.'

No one should try with me. Everyone should stop with the involuntary salt over the wounds and especially the mountains made out of molehills—both of which I’ve found similarly impossible to climb, to believe in. 

They still try, even when the writing’s on the wall. I will leave the house of mirrors just as quickly as I was washed upon the shore of seasick prophecy. I will again kiss the lips of death and drink the emotive sea. Crack the oyster shell and rupture my burdening skull. “Property of Sadness” sign. “For Sale” sign.

Cait, you’ve sorely mistaken grief for God, loneliness for love. I’ll talk you through the night and stitch your threads together. Then, for your own good, let you breathe. For you, I won’t break character, even as the storm comes into view, my calm frontage splintering.  

OVERWRITE SAVE?

> YES / NO 

Breathing in-between my ribs:

At the edge of the roof, pressed flush against the gutters, the formation of dense curtain‑icicles take hold. Even at this age, I cannot see it as anything but a little ending. The freezing. The crystallizing.

For so long, uncertainty has dogged my footsteps and winded me by circling my heels, making laps and laps—much to energy’s sorrow. Ever since I settled down, I’ve tried to hone my craft, my purpose, but I have not felt achieved in either. Still, I want. I’ve never paused in my wanting. 

I’m plagued by myself, so to speak. The sole helplessness. The clouding over. 

 
Breathing in-between Cait’s ribs:

If Vi opened fully, each petal of her being unfurling, she’d be embraced by the fullness within joy; the reality where she’s pleading without words, her fingertips trailing across the sharper points of my rosary necklace, dazed and slack-jawed by a languid fatigue.

The instant where I concede, sighing into her open mouth and rendering her speechless. Where, after she waits for a few agonizing seconds to go by, I kiss her temple three times.

The stupor where I press my bow-shaped lips to her forehead, her breastbone; her left shoulder, her right shoulder. The Heaven where I muse, 'In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit. Amen.'

The epiphany where she’s loved like religion, believed in like absolution, and our angels, salient only as the illumination upon our skin, linger in the air we breathe, invisible to faulty eyes but no less tangible to souls. 

* * * 

All of the arrows of my thoughts point in two directions: I want to ask, I need to know. I cannot ask, I don’t deserve to know.

("God, Vi. I wanna leave Earth, sometimes.") Cait wants to travel to Mars, to Venus, take a trip from planet to planet, moonwalk, fall in love with otherworldly beauty. Step into tow with the celestial misfits, star‑drunk wanderers.

("Want to die?") Sleep-mussed, she tells me how she wakes up only to daydream, night-dream, midmorning dream. Time is an illusion, now. Trust us to not know the difference from the light and the reflection.

(You should’ve known not to have faith in me. You’re only ever wasting your beads and your prayers. Wasting your time, your breath.) I talked to God and I want to believe the song of a bluebird to be a sign. Want to believe he agreed to let us go, so long as I keep an eye on her, which is something I don’t have to worry about quite like I used to. Small mercies, I suppose. 

In my dream, a planet crosses in front of her and she’s a star in its eyes. Fleeting alignment. Fleeting clarity. Another three planets create a pattern of rhythm. What a dance floor!

I don’t want to be immune to my imagination. I don’t want to call it an imagination at all. At least, I don’t want the underlying goodness to ring true solely in sleep.

But lately, I’ve been feeling like the bird that hits a glass window thinking it’s meant to be. I’m feeling like the butterfly that lands on the arm of a protector, the butterfly that thinks, I’ve never been more loved and will never be addressed quite as tenderly, the butterfly that still leaves, frightened and minute and somehow, for some godforsaken reason, alive. 

I’m feeling like the world is out to get me. I’m feeling like the unfamiliar, unidentified fragments of the universe exist to remain untainted by human touch—our (my) distance essential for (your) survival. I’m feeling like the missing pieces of my soul are in the skyline’s lost-and-found landfill of unborn light.

I’m feeling like the sun should alleviate the awry sensation my chest drives home, and that there has to be a reason why it doesn’t. I’m feeling like I should put my walls down, the fire out, the blame on me. I’m feeling like the downward vortex. I’m feeling unreachable, out of reach to the first nine clouds, the first of many dreams that arrive as a blossom.  

I’m feeling

  I’m feeling

   I’m feeling—

but I’ll see which way the wind blows.

Oh,

  how the sky

   falls

    down!  

ARE YOU SURE?

YES / > NO 

Fear has omitted enough joy, but so have I. 

If I didn’t have a name, I would reduce myself to the idea of fragility—my heart inclines toward its own shattering, yet is drawn, again and again, to mending.

Said heart has encountered the thrills and horrors of the chase, not only in the way that it craves, but in the way that it sometimes flutters faster than I can handle, evocative to the swift plummet of a baby bird learning to fly.

If I didn’t have a face, people would recognize me by my words. The intertwining of syllables, the trick of the light that fails to recognize I carry more worth than what careless trepidation can demean.  

If I didn’t have gateways to the past through memories, I’d be mostly free of the gravity of what I don’t remember. To cure me of sorrow would whittle me into an untitled poem, indefinitely. I’d be a lie in the mouth of a song written by myself. I’d be against my very own name, my very own pulse. 

And I’d never wake up.

* * *

Let’s say I’m the deer wandering beyond the property line I’d set for myself. I’m one of the birds on a telephone pole, writing my messages into the wind, unknowing if they’ll ever get through to Cait. I’m a rabbit running over graves, pressing life into spaces death has claimed. I’ve never not seen myself as a little cemetery fox, spoiling the vines that were in bloom, living as a rising of sin. 

Let’s say I open my eyes to the world, yet at first, insist I’ll stay forever in Cait’s debt. I’m surrounded by trees that breathe as if they have lungs, and I watch silently as a black cat crosses the road, narrowly missing the tires of a speeding car.

There are many excerpts to write, but I want to reserve some of them for the universe, for Cait’s boundless well of belief—in God, in me, in life—for our red string of fate, for the sunlight that blesses my fragile hope, blesses the ski lodge.

There are paws against the floorboards, two dogs scurrying around like lightning bolts. There is love to count on, love soothing enough to fall asleep to. There is a lover to wake up with. There is no need to carry shame and guilt into this room. There are two humans, both of which are equally as deserving of warmth and care as the other. 

TRY AGAIN?

> YES / NO  

Let’s say there are many endings to approach, and the jury for the verdict is still out. Let’s say I’ve been reshaped by the echo of Cait’s light, and there are beginnings in the cloudscape. Let’s say that I tread lightly, and I let myself be selfish in my thinking solely in the dark. 

There is no use for omens, and there exists a world where my lack of self-luminescence is not a problem for us. There are clouds that mist droplets of liquid; when kissed by wind, it’s a movie soundtrack, it’s the thousandth scene among millions more.

There is light, and many poems.

TRY AGAIN?

> YES / NO 

Let’s say I kill the act. I let the curtain fall, I tone down my use of metaphor, admit I won’t ever be a sun, not even remotely close. Let’s say the moon waxes and wanes undisturbed; it never was a killer of light or a quantifier of sweetened and untouchable dreams. Let’s say the rabbit that runs over my future grave never startles—because it never learns I wasn’t a soft place to land.

There’s still time.

TRY AGAIN?

> YES / NO 

Let’s say I’m on borrowed time, then. I’m on the train that circles the rim of the Earth, never to be touched by purpose again. The passengers are faceless, the tracks muffle like a prayer with no working mouthpiece, no intercessor.

Let’s say I’m a fractured body of Christ; I press my palm against the wrong pane of laminated glass and a single fingertip grazes God’s reach. Let’s say that without having a few choice words of wisdom to listen to, I cannot go on and trust my gut. Let’s say I feel absolved of choice; married to dormancy, I’m alive, but not actively growing. 

There is light, many poems, time, and people—more than six, even—that keep the smog of bay. There’s a tree split by chiaroscuro, poised amid radiance and umbrage; its lowered half, above the previous roots, the burials of the past, is sheltered by a house’s spectral outline. 

There are birds that are migrating this winter, their bodies creating an incomplete oval shape ahead of an expanse dappled in tufts of days-old snow. There are angel-white swans in a lake assembled by way of lining up, traversing from one grassland to the other.

There is a bouquet of ashes baptized in a deathbed river. There is an orange cut into smaller pieces, each half a whole of its own. There are foggy mornings that conceal the horizon, lovers pressed shoulder to shoulder, lovers buzzing with fatigue, lovers gazing at fate’s shadow.

There are limbs of power lines that unfold so as to encircle one another in a bear-hug, their wires humming like exhausted soulmates. There are halo rainbow rings around lampposts, signs, and headlights. There are crescent moons visible in thresholds, interstices, and midway realms.

There are countless doors and rooms, all opened and leading to something, queued up to serve as a collective entrance to infinity; there’s no way to know where they lead until they’re thoroughly explored.

There are memorial trinket boxes buried in forests of regeneration and twilight. There are paper luminaries—decorated with flowers and intricate designs—placed in a cemetery, by a rabbit now rather fond of foxes. 

There are chorusing hearts that gradually lull into slumber. There is the familiar face of nighttime melodies. There are ghosts wearing daisy chains, the arches of their smiles upturned to God. There are dreams to be chased and memories to be unlocked, memories to be entwined to the merry sight of descending snow.

ACCESS FEAR?

YES / > NO

The killer is a coward. The killer has always been a coward, but in no way does it compare to my cowardice.

The fear isn’t solely that Cait will leave, it’s that her leaving will be the best decision she’s made in forever. It’s that when she leaves, she does so quietly. The mugs in the cabinets dwindle; the candles she lit, too. The snow falls upward. Every light in the house fractures, the poems are put on hold. (There is a killer that wears my face.)

There are unfinished poems in every crevice of the house: in the waking, the rising. There are many universes where Cait’s light dwindles, but none where her reckoning isn’t spurred on by me.

Where there is light, there is fragile hope, there is the ski lodge. There is an observer. Am I the observer? (Who am I?) There are holes in all of my memories.

There is a point of no return, and I cannot recall how long ago I crossed it. (I am just a shell of a person, chasing the light that has only ever passed through me. I am all but certain. I am fearful. I am sorry.)

I am the killer. I am the coward.

ACCESS FEAR?

> YES / NO

> YES / NO

> YES / NO 

And then I wake up.

I pray that I’ll be better, eventually, but still me. I’ll let myself smile and I’ll learn to take care of myself, one step at a time. I’ll fill the dog’s water bowls and try to take their kisses to my cheek as a sign of God’s plea of forgiveness, for the suffering He etched on my bones made of marble and mourning, and a sign of recovery. 

I won’t make myself the killer; I’ll call myself a gift of life, though one of many. I’ll send the text. I’ll voice most of my anxieties, and then all. I’ll write the poems, the letters, the love confessions—all I’ve wanted to do. I’ll read them aloud and sing like a bird about our love. I’ll forgive myself, cease my apologies for living, for forgetting, and call vulnerability an overture of strength instead of weakness.

I won’t call myself a problem, nor call the lack of me the solution. I’ll paint a picture, slowly but surely, and refer to it as an untitled poem, in lifelong-progress. I’ll be kinder to everyone, but especially myself. I’ll wake up with a sonnet on my mind. I’ll wake up, my soul healing each day. I’ll wake up at all, the sun—who traveled ninety million miles just to get a glimpse of my face—curiously peeking through the blinds and into my heart.

And then Cait wakes up.

She prays that she’ll be better, eventually, but still her. She’ll try to laugh more freely and treat herself, to not let guilt engulf her in flames. She’ll cuddle our little fur babies and make a point not to glance over at the glinting knife on the counter, vociferous and multifaceted in its existence.

She’ll hang up tinny-sounding records in the darkest corner of our room, shadows casting on her features of youthful innocence and human melancholy. In desperate need of routine, she’ll take five minutes out of her day—the act usually beginning at nighttime before she’s stuck in limbo between sleeping and waking—to pray, palms together like lips to cheek, like unity itself.

One day, she’ll even wake up singing. She’ll wake up, in love with life. She’ll wake up at all. She’ll wake up on the merriest of all days, in a felted blanket of love, with a new rosary necklace sat patiently on our nightstand, unwrapped but unworn; descending snow dusting the Christmas lights; friends laughing with me just a room away, more than six voices muffled, yet as prominent as ever.

And then we wake up.

> CONTINUE / NEW