Night falls on romantic thoughts. When I say I am dreaming of you, what I mean is—I am dreaming about a bloom that never fades, like I wish I could. There is a flicker of light that casts itself in the shadows of this dark-tinged path. My ears fill with the sounds of brown paws that crush moist leaves. My nose takes in air of decomposing earth matter and acorns that crack open to splatter their guts on the sidewalk.  

It’s November, baby. A blue sky caresses orange trees that shed their skin like snowflakes. The wind is a painter who flirts through his display of designs drawn from cascading leaves. He holds the body of each leaf—lowering slowly, gently, to lay them down on the forest floor, like I wish you would. 

You used to call me baby and then put me in a car. You wouldn’t look away until I disappeared into the rush of city traffic. Your thin frame billowing in drapes of black. Your huge eyes blinking back at my departure. I used to take it for granted, the way you made everything a ceremony. The way you kneeled on the floor to fold your clothes into perfect form. The way you looked at me as if I was always in full bloom. And now, I wish I would. 

There is a flame that flickers from the lamp post that marks the entrance to the Circle, which brings me around and around this realm of lost souls. I am screaming—screaming like death himself has wrapped his claws around my neck and ripped. And yet, there is not a noise in this night that holds the memory of pain in its stillness. 

I only feel human in the first glimpses of morning and in the cover of nightfall. When the sun is peaking, and they are all rushing to reach some unknown place, is when a heavy fog of lethargy sets in and stirs a ravenous hunger inside of me. 

There is a ball of grief that creeps through my body, making itself a home in the different parts of my bones. It weighs me down so that I can feel myself entering this plane of existence. It lumps in my throat when the silence becomes terror. It lodges below my navel when I can’t stop running. It pushes against my heart, it pushes against my back. The doctors and I play hide and seek. When they go to look, it isn’t there. It is a reminder that I am flesh that needs to be warmed by the ingredients of Earth. It is a reminder that I am blood that wants to move even when those claws come to drain me dry.

Maybe it is all in my head. Just like my body, my mind likes to play tricks on me. One day it is raining gold and the next day it ties me in threads. Surely, we were not born from the intelligence of nature to be so utterly useless. Storms of destruction and violence and apathy, and this existence moves the ball to lurch my stomach into nausea. If only I could spill my guts out onto these November days that drench into evolving darkness, and your voice that vibrates through me, like I wish you would.