today feels like yesterday

Wake your body, still aching, mid drowning vision.
Discard blankets for trembling air, cold tracing each exposure as if it doesn’t know it hurts.
These clothes are stiff, but stiff keeps all of your pieces
together.

Splash water. The mirror is wrong. You can take close enough, but the window is better,
because cold suns and cold clouds are not like cold skin, and you have a halo to greet you.

Breathe.

All you can remember is this time yesterday
and the day before, 
because similar memories stick together in your mind,
but you’ll find new ones when a different moment slips in.

Step outside. Discarded cans, more halos, these strung on street lamps. Noise.

The lights change as they always have,
predictably,
and this song played last week,
but oh, you don’t care,
you don’t care, you know them all anyway.

Your feet are trapped in tempo.

The sidewalks and the snow look the same,
but you know the change they’ve seen,
and they know where you’re going,
know tomorrow you’ll do this again.

Know you’ll wake your body. Cold. Aching.
A cycle you can’t escape
when your feet move without you,
still half asleep.
In a world so full,
there are no empty places to scream.

And the ache. It’s an ache to scream.

And you could spin,
spin like the wheel that keeps repeating
the days you live, each the same, moving in standstill,
but faster, faster,
enough to make you sick.

You could spin like a god with your halo,
because the world looks different with blurry vision,
not quite drowning, but melted like watercolor at your fingertips.
Cold feet moving to your own rhythm,
scream coming in the way you writhe,
reckless.
Your body not knowing the difference between danger and dancing.

You could slow. You could kneel. You could lie.
Wet grass is softer than the blankets, and tears taste alive.
Ragged breath cutting, stolen, uncovered.
Real.

You can imagine. This. This, you haven’t done.

Instead, you keep walking.