On quarantine

  Quarantine has proven to be yet another time for self-reflection but it has also been greatly trying for my mind. The house has become toxic, the strands holding it together falling apart faster than it would in any other case. Last year this time around I felt so much sturdier, wobbling but somehow still starry-eyed. I felt I was heading always towards a certain esoteric balance and equilibrium. I felt secure in my relationships with others.
  Yet now I feel more pieces of my life needing to be cut off and taken away, for they are spreading on my psyche in a way that can only be called catastrophic: not exactly cancerous but rather closer to the spreading of gangrene. I feel uncertain in all things except my close family. Everyone keeps saying how this is a time for inner change and development and so on but the truth is that not all of us are allowed the mental space for such an inner reflection. A healthy environment and a lack of anxiety for basic things in the future are necessary for such a thing to happen.
  And so it is not like that. I am mourning for relationships that have fallen irrevocably apart and that have been doing so for some time now. I can at least have the time to do so properly I suppose. But there is not future that I can foresee to plan for. Everything shifts faster than sand under the gusts of wind. In some respects that is relieving and forces one to obtain roots in the present.

*

Stop searching

You said
that many years ago
indeed you put up a wall.
"I stopped searching for you."

But I didn't.
It took me much longer to accept
to move on
to stop looking around every corner
under every word.

And now
years later
you told me "I love you"
in the airport.
"If you don't come
I will.
I don't know
if I can even last a month."

Amidst all the silence
all the chaos
all the ground going under our feet
did you stop looking for me?

I have no reason to give you to stay.
I'm not even looking for one.
The silence has
encircled me.