just this much

The day fills in the places where our expectations failed, the real deal versus the best laid plan, the span of sky that seals us in. Spring comes with all its blues and greens, the press of sun commanding skin. Spring comes with all its birds and engines. There is a space where the curtains loll open, a stripe of light against the wall. A sharpness there to bite the eye as I cower and cry, the unlit room forever closing in. The weeping a leaking of the heart, a place where the mind leaks out. All the brightness upon the palette dries to occlude the truth.

The seasons peel off, one after another, the years barely linger. All the chances are gone. Just words that no one reads, and words never written. The flutter and the rumble of passing engines, everyone so hungry and so excited, rushing around to fill in the blanks of their future conversations. The reasons always turning over as the cognitive dissonance becomes the zeitgeist. The zaftig explanations spilling despair over the unaware as the world sinks beneath the final horizon.

I feel it in my heart as if I was dying, but I feel it every day, so it’s an everyday sort of dying. The beat downs and bitten offs add up, and we die in our insistent repetitions, flies on the windowsill, moths to the flame. The striving lives choke out the broken and the slowed, the wheel turns, and the traveling company becomes the Broadway cast. The old ensemble disassembles, and even the words give way. The roles dwindle and the offers all dry out. Eventually even the scraps you’ll take become too much to ask for. Just this much, just this one day, just this moment. As if.