Obligation?

It descends like an unwanted houseguest who turned away would be homeless, and thus due to cruel laws of humanity and hospitality, its here to stay. It’s chaffing, obligatory, unavoidable and felt so deeply inside as to be inevitable. Its shape shifting and guileless, fascinating and exhausting. It takes up all the air in the room and space in the house threatening to burst the seams. It leaves nothing but a vast and endless emptiness. 

It flutters through the body, tampering with the mind and soul, gilding all it touches with a ribbon of numbness until piercing bright white patches of pain into unsuspecting parts of the body, causing one to gasp out loud, startled, disoriented and already plunging into a free fall over the precipice of a sudden dissolution into the same tears which are alternatively housed in one’s heart, one’s stomach and one’s throat, despite the drought it is always present in endless supply.

And I alternate between wanting to chase it away and stroke it, to sit down next to it and move myself into its good graces, offer it a cup of tea, to kill it with kindness in the attempt to know it. To seduce it? To be fascinated by it. To interrogate it, why are you here, how long will you stay, when will you go? I long to understand it, as if by thoroughly understanding it, by mastering it, by being able to dissect it  and take it apart I will be able to find an epoxy somewhere among it’s fractured pieces to slather on myself and become once again whole.