the world without you

I end my day much as I began it, behind the weather, my bones a song. The slow creep of icy fog, the otherworldly glow of a shrouded sun. I dragged along, strung on words and will. My thoughts all snips and shreds, my mood a little colder than blue murder. Another series of little slips and deadpan failures. Another day swathed in smoke and cloth, smoldering in artificial light.

You are more story, thriving somewhere out of sight. You are that litany of wishes always wasting my breath. That bird in flight, that wishing star. That formidable endurance of addiction, the sickness of reason dying in longing's light. Something in the spill of the hair of a stranger, something in the distance so livid in other eyes. You are sword and stone, some country made of myths and loss.

Night is seeping in through the walls. Tendrils of vapor mark the graves of fallen rain. Cats fight and spit, shrieking the substance out of my last nerve. Dogs bark over the droning of the tone-deaf television. I follow the words to their evening roost. I follow the weather, just a few steps behind the forecast. Here in the world without you, nothing is news.