conjure

It is a season laden with tinsel, built on colored lights and expectation. The day turns darker, from unduly bright to uncommonly gray in the time it takes to frame a thought or buy an alibi. I rise from the mud and detritus, my work lingering a little in the dirt this morning, staggered and feeling the shifting of worlds. My feet find their purchase on kitchen floors and basketball courts, and work is the tracing of familiar forms as if they were fresh and new. Child's play and all the gristle of the discarded and the abandoned, heaps of indignity and disappointment served in generously cruel amounts. I find the time to watch the sky as clouds crawl and idle. I find the time to think of you.

I still expect to see your eyes, to hear your voice in these colder moments. I could measure every livid detail of you, eyes shut and left to my own means. I conjure you from strange remainders and the dust that rises when something settled in suddenly gone. I conjure you from bad days and and dismal notions, from the gun metal gray flavor that hijacks my tongue, from the lonesome purchase of another cement step keeping company with the rain and the crows. It feels close enough to real to remind me of the fixed distances and the broken light. It feels close enough to be the mark left on my heart from all this missing.

The day folds and the night chases its tail. The heavens clamber and crumble, every light left submerged beneath the surface of the sky. I settle into the fuzz of other places, the soft hum of electric imitation. Some song left on from another life, something on tv to tell me how wrong I live. I will sleep in the hush and chill of another night without you, restless only in these thoughts of your absence. I think of all the things to tell you, of all the things we would do. I slow into silence, into the gnawing empty of the world I know.