An Afternoon Cry

Let        me        have      this.

Let me be a great big mess.

Cover up my face, don’t look, but let

me fret that this is the best you can get

from me.

I asked, “Will you be tired of this?”

You said, “For 13 years, I’d be tired of this.”

I asked, “For one?”

Because the depressed don’t respect real time.

It doesn’t exist.

Every year is thirteen.

And you answered but I don’t know how,

probably saying, “It won’t stay this way,” but I didn’t quite catch

what you said because I was thinking in paragraphs.

I thought, “I will be this way forever.

This does not improve. I will not get better.

The devil I have is here, I am she,

and you will leave me, because this was not on the packaging.”

So I looked away from you and looked at nothing,

ashamed of my false advertising.

You saw something in my face I couldn’t, so you sat on the bed,

wrapped me in a blanket,

swaddled my head,

And I wept for us both.

But I wept for me more,

that you’d tired of me, and that I would be alone and die alone,

as I always suspected. I expected nothing more until I came to you,

when I was doped on meds and

I doped you, too.

I’m sorry that I doped you, too.

I said, “I feel hopeless.”

And cried some more.

You were rubbing my back and the track looped in my head, that symphony

of dead-ends and sorrow and knives,

and you were rubbing my back, so gentle, so locked in life

while I was crying in your arms, locked out of it,

begging for someone to open the door,

and I cried some more, and I cried some more.