Stepping stone

I stand by the balcony with a peculiar feeling and spend the night lolling about my little room. My face is burning, and I feel startled, flush up against an emotion I can't name, one eerily like terror but unlike joy. My heart is rusty from the old pinions that hold it shut. I skewed my imaginings towards the grotesque, hoping to avoid later delusion.

The pain of singlehood loneliness still haunts me. But life was round, sweet during those flitting moments when he was holding my hand, whenever he was close enough for me to catch the scent of him. Why is my heart flailing against my chest?

In those solitary evenings by myself, I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain.

At sunrise I am still awake, sitting there in tremors, emotions tumbling, colliding, an icy free fall from one life into the next.

I've made up my desicion.