This is your alone.

It’s 22:09 and the clock won’t move fast enough for tonight to be over already. There’s a girl who has inhabited every space inside of you, whose voice won’t stop ringing in your ears, whose name won’t stop spilling from your pen and into the margins of your notebooks and line breaks in your poetry. There’s a crowded room inside your heart you have to leave just to breathe a little bit. The walls of your bones are caving in tonight, and you don’t know where to go.

It has been weeks since your rib cage smiled. Your fingers hover over the keys trying to find a safe landing that will describe the scream in your skin, and the hollow in the womb of your stomach, but no string of sentences can ever be enough. It seems as though the sun fell asleep for too long, the stars decided to play hide and seek with clouds that burst and mimic your eyes, they are so squeaky clean- you don’t know when they’ll dry.

Streetlights blur by your windowpane, and days blink into nights. You think about a certain kind of sadness that has become your friend, become the answer to the empty side of the bed, the no longer stranger sleeping in your chest. You stare at the naked ceiling, the spinning fan, the tired bulb, and you wonder when you stopped seeing things. You scroll through a list of names you cannot call, a list of names you wish you could, and everything seems the same. Your nails play games with the lining of your skin, your teeth teasing your lower lip, and you wonder when you stopped feeling things.

All the words you cannot find the courage to rescue from your fear swim to the basement of your throat in a ball of Christmas lights you cannot see through the thickness of the fog. Memories play in infinity loops across your mind, and secondhand sunshine trickles through them. You realise that this right here is your solitude. Your lonely. The only thing you have when everything leaves as it always does,when autumn always comes- this is it. There’s a girl who doesn’t realise she is holding the puppeteer’s strings to your heart, and the slightest tug could pull it together or tear it apart. There’s a glass that has been empty even when it’s half full, that has been half full even when it’s filled to the brim. Your eyes cannot stop from leaking and flooding the floors of your faith. This is your alone. You glance at the clock and it’s 22:10.