the space between
i remember summer, remember losing it, beaten down by a million raindrop fists. i opened the door to october, and smelled cold fire and ash. it smelled of nothing. winter wormed into autumn's corpse, and the suicide trees lost their leaves. skeleton machinery reaching into the night, bony fingers waiting to rip life away. they tangled in power lines, crow-dotted, crooked boundaries splitting the sky like glass. there's a hush in the air, deafening in it's finality, and only the drowning man can hear it.

in the dark my car is red, warm wine or old blood. it is red and occupied by days long past. days of worry and a little hope, days of effort and feeling something real. the ghosts pile in, they always do, but none so boldly as my passenger, loose-tied boot heavy on the dash, arm out the window, letting the cold in.

my bathroom door is no such thing. not a bathroom door. it's just the door i sat behind so often, locking in my tears, shaking and bleeding and cowering. when i had the will to do such things. when i venture to close to that corner i can hear him, muffled, grit-teethed voice, the sharp sound of his fist against the door. frustration. anger. love, maybe. once.

the shadows like to trick me at night, when i lie unable to sleep. i drift in and out of mercifully dreamless time-loss and open my eyes to the curve of a shoulder, the close warmth of another for the briefest of moments. my dogs lie snoring in their beds, and the expanse of mine is suddenly too vast to comprehend. i think of downsizing, queen to double, to twin, but i know nothing would change.

when i watch Six Feet Under with my friend it's as close to feeling for anyone as i can come. those people, behind the liquid crystal compressed pictures flickering on my screen. sometimes there are quiet moments, so touching, so beautiful, i would close my eyes and smile if i didn't know it was the same way he used to do. so i do nothing, see him do it for me in some far corner of my mind, and forget myself.

four years ago i told the world i was giving it one year and one month to get better. one year and one month or i'd end it in one of the thousand ways i know how. it didn't get better, i just forgot. and when i glance backward, i wish i could have realised then how much better it already was. it was all down hill. when i was twenty-seven i refused to kill myself, because it was a number i didn't deserve.

i wasn't even a shadow of the people who own that number no matter how i loved them. Joplin, Hendrix, Cobain. twenty-seven wasn't an option. in a month i'll be twenty-nine. i don't fear thirty. i just have no interest in it.

i've lost all my music. somewhere between melody and harmony is where those ghosts hide, riding the waves between minor fall and majour lift. were i to give up the music that causes pain now, my world would be nothing but the grinding gears of this horrible machine, the groans and gasps as it bleeds slowly to death around us all.

everything i ever loved is tainted, and i cannot seem to free it.