Brooke Forbes

I know it’s early but I cannot rest, for you are conjured in the stillness.

These sheets behold me to my mind, and I cannot fool the beast from this pillow.

The weight of you presses against my eyelids as they lower. Semiconsciousness is my prison.

My thoughts are thrown about in a gust of remembering your existence. I am chilled.

My chest rises with the winter sun but swiftly falls, as you enter the room yet again.

I must wake.

The footpath is littered with red and orange, and I see it before I even rise.

The hairs on my skin perceive the cold before I do, and my churning stomach knows it’s June.

You will be free soon, and as for me, I am shackled to the season.

My cold skin swaddles the terror and rocks it gently between my bones.

I am trapped in a web of exposed branches and brittle leaves. Tangled and bare. Rattled.

This process is purgatory. Which parts of me have you not written?

What it is to know myself through the consequences of your actions.

Shame and self loathing greet me at your door, and cordially invite me in. The scourge of you revisits my throat. It is still unsafe to feel safe.

I build walls to guard against my own complacency, but they do not keep me warm.

Resistance is tiresome, but when I tease myself with apathy, I am numb.

My old friend vigilance would never leave me in these weary moments. She tints the glass of my morning mirror. Forget her prefix. You’re heading my way.

This pain is nebulous like the morning fog – hovering and thick and I cannot see beyond it.

The days are short, and the darkness is long. And you are the darkness.

This is a poem featured as part of the Survival Micro Lit/ Poetry Competition.