Maddening. Nothing.

It's not enough.
I need more.
Nothing seems to satisfy.
I said,
I don't want it.
I just need it.
To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive.

Today was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it flash of sunlight and teeth. A care taken in dressing to depress, a step taken in learning the difference between people telling the truth and people telling Bridget what they think she wants to hear.

It's okay, I understand perfectly and so the only thing I can do is bring the storm clouds in rather close and let you be absorbed by the black of my dress and if you're really lucky I'll distract you with my own wicked humor, borne in exhaustion and habitual solitude.

It's alright, really. Ben has gone and is doing his customary thing in which he drops off the face of the earth because he is used to this and still it gets no easier for me but I was never so independent and that's okay, I'm going to give up trying to change that and will go to my grave reaching out for arms within which to find my safety. Never mind that I'll be dead. It really won't impact that action because I already do it in my sleep and have the aching limbs to prove it.

Caleb left this morning, content in obtaining proof that I'll reach for him too and I will because in the dark he is Cole, a memory of love now dead and cold but of love nonetheless, and nothing more than that. In the dark it's everything I need. In the light it is shameful, the weight of a thousand secrets pressing down on my bony shoulders, pounding me into the frozen earth.

It's the hidden disapproval in the otherwise stone expression of Caleb's driver/our bodyguard, Mike, who has been privy to more of my life in the past three years than anyone else I know and still he makes promises to me that are coerced out with threat of fire on the other side. I don't blame him but I can't trust him and I was foolish to think I could, but really, all secrets are open secrets in Bridget's house. She does not discriminate and for that the punishment was compliance, same as it ever is.

Luckily I can't feel anything anymore. But could I ever?