on loneliness

After Cameron Awkward-Rich

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I don’t stop to think about it. I get up, swallow my pills, have a coffee. The ghost by the kitchen window doesn’t bother me anymore. These days it barely looks like a person. I write it down, I write everything down. Poetry won’t get rid of it but it will help put it in its place. The garden birds have all gone away for the summer, I look for them between pages of someone else’s words instead. These days I find it easier to tell people that I’m okay living with myself, that I don’t miss drinking until the lamplights turn into shooting stars, that the sound of laughter coming from another room doesn’t feel like a dream I had when I was a child. My psychiatrist asks me about friendship & I tell him about distance. The distance between my heart & my fist, between my voice & the sun. Insurmountable. I wake up & it breaks my heart, but the clouds keep passing me by. It should all stop, I think, for my grief, it should all stop. I’m losing the world one piece at a time, check up on me next week & there will be no flowers by the edge of the road, no songs about old lovers that leave before you’re ready to let them go. Someone on the news tells me there’s about a million different people in this city that feel the same as I do, that even though the door is locked someone is still willing to knock. I ride the bus back home, stare at the houses I’ve known all my life, listen to the radio channel the driver has chosen to keep him company for tonight, & it breaks my heart. I feed my cats, browse my books, clean my room, & it breaks my heart. I look outside the window & oh, look at that.

The birds have come back.