The walls are breathing as I lie tilted and tumbling slowly in the cotton darkness. I can feel your arms around me like ghosts, cold with waiting. Lids close down and the universe shifts twenty seven point four degrees left and sixteen degrees back right as I jerk ahead and stumble over a crack in the floor that your dripping faucet forgot to mention as I crept across the cramped and crumbling tiles in search of a patch of air to place my potted plant, somewhere where the walls don't steal all of the air to sigh it out, chilled and empty, against my blind and blinking wrists-- pale, taut and trembling, always waiting. I focus my retinae to needlepoints to create a tiny one-moment, one-centimeter void, a lack of sensation, a relief on all fronts; potassium gates locked, pumps off. Sighing out to acidosis, concentration dropping, fingers twitching, pulse racing and nerves crackling. My bones release sounds and stiffness into the soft shoegazed abyss, but they leave energy with no will, windows with no shades to cover the unfortunate exhibition.
