It's the Journey

Winter is a gradual process.
Slithering across the cool tile floor until she reaches your ankles.
Pulls herself up, legs on either side of your thighs.
Seductive frigidity.
Winding across exposed stomach up your back.
Counting each vertebrae.
Goose bumps.
Something isn't right.
Shhhh she whispers in your ear.
Gently gliding through strands of your hair until settling in your scalp,
A kiss at your temple.
Sinking,
Sinking in.
Then...
                       it gets quiet.

It started that night at the diner
Fifth cup of coffee
Dumping a cream and a packet of Sweet n' Low in the cup before the coffee.
Watching white swirl amongst the brown.
Liquid vitality for the hopeless 3 AMers.
Inability to focus on my readings and assignments.
A little less getting done every day after.
Words a blur
Fade
F  a  d  i  n  g








Time is often marked by the shifting shadows of the drying, dying leaves fluttering outside my window.
The sun sleeps earlier, world in darkness.
Is it nostalgia or dependency?

I guess I don't really know.
When I plant, I plant my roots too deep, hoping for comfort.

         I told you to be patient
               You asked me to be kind
                        And it's all a waiting game
                                      We fabricate in our minds

There it was, that depression, creep
                                                         creep
                                                                  creeping.
Slowly.

I spent more hours wrapped up in the sheets of denial between my bed and his than I would like to admit.
Sleeping too often.
Eating too often.
Feeling the familiar too much and yet not enough.
Walking on the remnants of summer who had just died
Kaleidoscope dreams fading.
Holding on,
Clawing,
Pulling.
It dragged regardless.
Hope comes in April for me.
And never in the morning.

I had a good feeling about it,
Just this time.
Looking anxiously for the past week.
Entering my information in the correct boxes.
Hands knitting together with anxious anticipation.
The blue bar loading at the top of my screen with it's own careless cadence.
There it was.
My acceptance to graduate school.

You know, a lot of things lead up to where you are.
Pain.
Struggle.
Beauty.
Love.
All of it a single piece of time
Of experience.
Suddenly I realized that I don't know where I'll be at in five years.
Maybe not two.
I just know that I don't want people to go.
I don't want things to end.
I want to feel
and consume
and be and I don't want to let any of it slip away.
But I have to.
Natural order of change and all.
In that moment I felt proud of myself.
I felt truly proud that I was about to finish my undergrad and about to begin graduate school.
Not everyone does.
I made it through the fire of the past.
About to close that book and begin a new one.
Pushing the depression back again with the anticipation of a better future.
I could do nothing but sigh, bring my fingers to rest on my cheek, and think.

It's about the journey.
It's the privilege of occupying space of time, minutes, seconds, hours, with someone
Anyone.
No matter what they become.
More like who they help you to become.
Placing pieces back in your holes where you can no longer breath.
And the pieces you place back in them.
Or something like that.

"I will have been able to say that I loved him," I thought to myself as I looked around his room.
That night I laid on the inside, closest to window on my side.
He lay on his back.
Feeling us blink in the dark through the mattress.
"When you're there over winter break it will be bittersweet because all the time we spend together is studying or working out. It will be our first and last vacation together. The only time we got to honestly spend time without school with each other. Then when we get back we part ways."
I could feel something rising in my chest, up through my throat, but not tears.
Indignant over something that I knew had to happen.
That I had planned for and understood for in my mind anyway.
"It just makes me mad. We spent all this time together for nothing."
"I don't think it was for nothing. I'm sorry, I'm just being honest."
"I know. It's just sad. I'll enjoy what we have and take what I've learned."