AIRLOCKED

i’m in your walls, dwelling with cobwebs. history dictates i will expire here, between two-by-fours and plaster, never again illuminated. i have subsisted so long on a back burner’s heat that i have grown accustomed to stasis, goosebumps. i once walked around in a kilt and stockings every winter—this is still a new depth of frigidity.

here’s the thing: i have wanted to prove history wrong for years. even suspended in airless black chasm, i hold onto facsimiles of hope that when i reach the grave, i carry even a trace of love with me to whatever exists beyond. if nothing else, i believe, in the way some would say they were put here to be mothers, that i was put here to be a lover. i am a skeptic of fate, but i wonder why i have never broken the barrier of love, instead loving those who merely tolerate me—i am painfully aware of my shortcomings, how much space i truly take up. but i also know the way i make ardor an obsession and cannot believe no one wants to be loved like they are a yellow dwarf at the center of a galaxy.

i’m in the stars, floating like spacedust. in closer, alice says no one will ever love you as much as i do; why isn’t love enough? i do wonder what to do with all this emergency inside of my body, every bit of warmth now sapped from trembling core. everyone thinks it should be easy to quell the terrors that arise when i sense i have been left alone. i am collapsing, stellar explosions tearing my heart apart by the seams of its chambers, crying out for you. what are you waiting for?