Owe
You’ve been sitting at the edge of your bed,
Staring out aimlessly, into the darkness
You want to grab your soul — long left for dead,
And yank it off your body, its tightening harness
You tie it to a rock, a rock that has sat at the bottom of your heart, for over a decade now. The rock has collected the residual guilt of all your mistakes. The grandparent that you couldn’t bear to speak to as he slowly faded towards obscurity, the cat that starved to death, waiting for you to return and adopt him off the street, like you had promised. All of those souls, stained with your guilt — solidifying into a rock, trapped at the bottom of your heart. For most of the day, your conversations help you forget about the stone, but when you lie down at night, it presses down upon your chest like a paralysis that slowly engulfs you.
Our memories are like river water, stored away, for a long time, in a beaker. The happiness is the clarity on top — with time it will evaporate, leaving only pain and remorse behind — like scabs of dirt at the bottom.
Step out to the edge,
Let your feet
In the freezing cold, endure
Hold out your aching arms,
Over the balustrade
And let go of your weary soul,
Strung in regret.
Maybe this will buy you peace for a moment, but these memories are like ash. You want to brush them off your fingers, but they seem to disintegrate, become a part of your skin — invisible to the eye — their only reminders, that your skin doesn’t smell quite right.
Give yourself a moment to drown,
You owe yourself that.
