When the dead walk, my feet grow uncertain and mirrors turn away. I wonder if this is the way it will be: a swift and nearly silent reversion that tears away the seams and leaves me screaming inside.

I'd rather not have it that way.

Come online, damn it. I can't breathe.

I have felt my soul crumbling about me.

Who bears an immortal soul?
I think not I.
I feel it spin like a bloodless husk
While twilight's gray lead steeps my eyes
In dread and despair.

Hey hey, children, I'm lonely again.

It is difficult to be frank. I have spoken in metaphors for so long. I have been here before, the rare phases when I grow sick of my own verbosity, and force myself to vomit out my emotion in as bland of prose as I can muster. I can't help it.

I suppose that I resort to metaphor because I cannot express it any other way. How do I tell you that I am sad? Sad cannot begin to describe it. Language elevates it to the inner drama that plays out up here in my skull. What would you gain from common banter?

"How are you?"
"Sad."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I just am."

Beautifully articulate.

I'd like to find myself in a drunken place, so that when I looked 'round about, my hate would be justified, and my fear would make sense.
Live on, my friends; I would be so very, very little without you.

Stacey Bell, my twin soul:
"Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's."

I gave it up for a while, but I cannot bear the loneliness that strikes without warning and without cause and without hope. Ladies and gentlemen, I sincerely apologize for the overdramatization that I know occurs when it all falls, but what can I do when it hurts so badly? How do you make it through?
All that is left is to speak, but what might I say that would not drive you away? I trust you with anything, but I would not trust me with myself. I grow weary of flogging myself into circles.
You must understand how desperate I am for this. Perhaps I shall abandon it, in time. It stems from a need for help, but the unwillingness to burden any particular person with my own load. Perhaps that is not what friends are for; I don't know. Ask Stacey how it works, she may know.
Perhaps she knows what it is to have a spike driving through your skull, to know that pain is surely the only way. I'd love to bleed, love to bleed all over again, and justify myself in a haunting effigy of suffering. It wouldn't matter if anyone saw. I just want an end.
You look upon the brief and bitter arc of your life and find that you have done nothing, been nothing. A malignant spark that wastes and does not give.
Anything to assuage.
My last was poetry, but it was hardly good enough. This will not be good enough, for I will walk away from every line knowing that it did not say what truly went on, burrowing in my head. But it is a way, a way for me to weep without tears, to speak without voice, and to share with as little guilt as can be had. I will rest easier knowing that I did not force it on you, that I did not compel you to listen, that you came of your own will.
Nearly anything helps, when you begin to lose what is real amongst that which your own mind has sculpted.
I'm sorry, Colie, if I keep on and on. My mind has crafted it so that you hate me more and more each day. Your e-mails, your voice, they say otherwise, but those, and not my imagination, seem the charade. It is no fault of yours, and I keep fighting it, but I keep losing. Goddammit, I don't know what to do.
It is like fading in and out of consciousness, and I cannot control my dreams. They grow worse and worse, taking flesh with images and words and actions, poems and nightmares, hurt and regret.
Sleep, sleep, and dawn will come.