Exile, By Design. in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

My eyes have frozen over. Glazed glacial into icebound opaline mirrorballs of milk-marbled glass, lacquered like petrol slicks with the lunar luminescence of intransigence; they see nothing but horizons. Hinterland horizons where winter rises like the anti-sun, a spectral echo wreathed in shrouds of silvered chiffon cirrus-curls; horizons held hidden like silent secrets behind the opaque fern-frond fretwork of frost-feathered irises.

A morning mist stealing the skyline, erasing myself from the edges inwards, I am bleached to waning white-whisper shadows and disappearing like the daylight moon; I’m slipping through the gaps between your guarded glances, illusory as light refracted through a rockpool.

Dissolving, diffracting, while you are distracted I’m drifting away, diffuse and colorless as paint particles dispersed on a turpentine tide. I am a disconnect, a dial tone; the empty echo of soft susurrant static hissing haunted down a severed line, like shivers down a spine.

Curled close inside my fortress, folded foetal around the focus cupped in my palm like candlelight. Inside the serpentine secrecy of internal isolation I am under construction, deconstruction, destruction; introspective against the inspection of your shadow-army eyes. Silhouetted against winter-white skyscapes, their outstretched arms are only obstacles; familiar friendly faces carry care-grenades and fire the warning shots of worry-guns, they are unwelcome in my carefully-crafted citadel. I do not need outside forces crashing chaos cyclones through the clean lines of my emptiness, all I need is time.

Time to hide inside myself, an absentee absconding in degrees before your eyes; ensconced in the cold controlled cleanliness of consuming myself, of creating. Creating days perfectly polished to tourmaline teardrops of evasion and avoidance, of discipline and denial, stringing them together until I can wear them as a necklace; and pull it tight enough to choke myself.