in the hardened darkness of your shadow cast over me i can see the details despite a near total lack of sight. details and edges and breaths unbreathed as of yet, reminiscent of a future, each pause a threat to reason and a menace to sanity. i lie feeling each individual synapse traveling across ten-thousand-plus nerves, i feel the sinewy muscle fibers of my body tense up and release with each muted gasp for air.

i have a minimum of three distinct conversations with myself simultaneously and silently. the sheer breadth of subject matter leaves me flying between a dozen people harboring infinitely more disappointments; the terror creeps up on me, innocent and pathetic like a child clinging to his mother's skirts. rather than being happy that i can find and feel what i have come to assume is authentic love, i am crippled by the intense fear of it ceasing to exist. i am greedy. i think not of the moment, but how long it will suffice, when the next will manifest itself, only to be jolted back into the reality that today will never be enough. i try to remove myself, surgically. fused to an enigmatic twin, sewn tight in siam. i look him/her/it straight in the face and see nothing but dead eyes and space.

if white is the sum of all colors the empty air between my ears is in reality full and real and static and tangible.

but we all know white is not. nor is nothing.

simplicity is the new complication. complication is the new simplicity. i see not a personality but a series of trained reactions and randomly yet deliberately ingrained pieces of the galaxy. confined to my own personal universe, i see the swirling mass of a thousand ideas, conversations, television programs, radio advertisements, memories, doubts, and dust. i am incapable of sensing change within my own boundaries, and simply assume i have when those around me do not.

i am lost in familiarity. i am losing you, to familiarity.

my own feelings of degradation from day to trying day do not permit me license to break you down in efforts of somehow finding a common ground. from here, i will soar.