Aching

There is a certain and definitive helplessness in the dull ache of aloneness, that shadow that caresses the isolation of my skin, fibres reaching, always reaching. There is a pain, consistent and unavoidable, in the weight of miles pressed like bricks on the walls of my chest. There is a dishonesty in the brightness, lies embellishing the truth with crinkly wrapping and bright lights. There is a stripped down truth telling on nights like these, just me and the sky. There is an inability to communicate with the stars when they are wrapped in cotton clouds, opaque and unforgiving, uncaring towards the ache I feel. There is a distance up here, nestled in my pocket six floors above the street. There is an abandonment in the waiting, in the half-living. And it’s not permanent, I know that. It makes the helplessness all the heavier, the temporariness. Because amid the chaos, amid the empty-feeling and the aching is the guilt. The invalidity of the ache resulting from the beauty of the burning. There is a beauty here, between the layers of painfulness. There is an aching beauty, a startling glory which makes the hurting all the more unlivable. I’m here in all this grandeur and all this beauty and it still hurts. It hurts despite the beauty and despite the carpe diem and despite the glory. Because some nights I feel I’m just a shell up here, a shell unworthy of its ocean. And sometimes I resent it, the surrounding dishonesty of forced perfection. Sometimes I fall in love, but some nights I just fall. I’m still falling.