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Where does it begin?

Somewhere in the end of another thing I think. When one part of me fell asleep as another part of me began to wake up. Somewhere in the numbness that tingles up my fingers as they plink across keys with all the cold finality of another poorly written sentence.

I've been here before once. Undone. Left with pieces of me strewn about and hanging off of the walls, paint peeling and in disrepair and in disarray and distant from everything I thought I was before.

I have walked this walk. Danced this dance. Perhaps I'm not so clever as I think I am. Only a fool would fall for the same tricks twice. Only a fool would love without restraint or boundary and give and give until there was nothing left only to be left vacant in the end. A tree growing out of the naked air. Such a short and pretty thing, brief and violent and beautiful.

A bauble to turn in my shaking fingers. Another memory for another bottle in the pile that grows and shrinks with the years as they spin by.

I examine its painful facets. Made of memories still fresh in the corners of the places I made in my heart for it to fill. I turn it and twist it and bend it and taste it. I feel the full depth and breadth of the pains it causes me. Feel the eyes even as they scan the words with sad dispassion.

I will become something like this to her too I think. A brief and wonderful, terrible thing that sits in some neglected corner of another lonely shelf. Sitting, waiting, wishing for use to fulfill me or time to forget me.

I have become quiet in recent days. My loud happiness replaced with a meek and wounded whisper. I choke on the air I breathe and feel the splitting in my chest like an egg as I desperately try to contain the leaking yolk. the viscous fluids of my spirit slowly dripping between my fingers until the empty, cracked shell is all that's left of me.

I'm hungry. Starving. Longing for a satisfaction that comes from neither food nor drink. A diet of pills and gulps of air and the occasional celery stick are all there is to sustain me. Every flavor falls flat and tasteless. Every voice falls on deaf ears. I hear a song and think it pretty and perhaps it calms the riot in my veins for a moment... but the moment passes and the riot becomes another slow and steady tremolo. A beat that times me to the tune of my own reckoning.

The world contracts. Everything a little bit smaller. Every light a little less bright. What do I change? How do I cross this bridge? Is it even worth crossing to begin with?

I have people and things to support. A life built. A son to raise to be better than I ever could be. I am in the best time of my life financially and in my career and everything is moving in ways and places that are bringing me fortune and happiness. Every trajectory is upward. Every road leads to places of fulfillment.

Except this one. Except where perhaps I need it most. In the counterpoint to my spirit where I draw so much of my being.

I was not a creature made to operate in solidarity.

Maybe here... At the end of another page as another begins.

Lies the lesson.