down in me

I see the veins in my hands. Maybe due to the cold, my skin’s translucence allows me to see the green and purple lines travelling from my palms, branching outwards through the tips of my fingers. I never noticed them before. I noticed the new wrinkles in the skin on the back of my hand a few years back now. I decided then that life was finally beginning to wear on me. Down on me. Wear me down. How little I knew then in comparison to the even less I know now.

I touch my fingertips together in a specific way to release the tension when I am feeling that particular unease, though it does little to alleviate my baseless fears. He noticed it once, decades ago and ignited the awareness, suggesting something hideously wrong with my mannerisms. Something to be molded into a rather more acceptable form. Something that must always be done while other things are coming undone. I am exhausted from teetering carefully on this farcical edge.

I flashback to your hands, palest white and strangely even, like the clichéd surface of a rose petal. The palms and fingertips calloused at every fold, the wretched jagged nails, dirty and unkempt like so much else about you. I sense your fingertip moving inwards along my palm, tracing the trails of my lifeblood. I feel a ragged nail graze my softness tenderly. It runs over the scars and beyond, to the flesh of my forearm. Fingertips feel their way through distant patches that were never perturbed.

I cry out for that touch sense existing only in that moment that has now slipped coldly through my aching grasp.

I am the walking dead again. A lifeless body that smooths along without trace. A ghost whose hold cannot be held or sensed, much less inhaled or tasted. The myriad faces that barely swirl the air around me are clear white unrecognisable. I am clouded by the blurry view over my swollen, reddened eyes. I am enveloped in a heavy shroud of dew and mist and dust and clouds and self horror.