Shapeshifting in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

The wind whispers idle songs of ruin that kiss my hair as soft as snowflakes, a wistful wordless requiem that echoes through the hollow holes in me like oxygen.

This is the moment, the freeze-frame stolen moment of swollen soft-focus winter sunbeams, refracting hazy and glazed on sugar-crystal frost. It’s all sunspangled snowscapes and platinum stars, the world irridescent, wide and whitewashed and shot through with silver; breathing is easy and it feels so, so good.

This is the moment where possibility seems almost close enough touch, a nebula of longing, of lustrous temptation, airbrushed with innocence and veiled in white lace. That it could always be so easy; that I could be what I want, without paying the price. That I could be weightless, a feather-foot astral dancer swirling soundless and boundless, riding the light. Leaving no footprints, ghostly and graceful, transparent and transient, fragile and free.

I am a shapeshifter, I am already changing. An eighth of myself left behind in last week and the familiar fractal form of myself is unfurling, unzipping this foreign skin, shedding it and surfacing like I’ve been swimming underwater. The hard scalloped edges at the bottom of my ribcage, the sharp-slanted corners my searching fingers have missed so much, the clean concave curve of complete emptiness; I’m in love, I’m in love with this feeling and my lungs burn with wonder.

Trying to warn me, to restrain and contain me, the skewed shadow hands of knowledge and disappointment leave guilty bruises; blurred watercolour welts across my wrists where they grapple to grasp me in slippery grip. Knowledge has haunted black eyes and sliced-up scarred arms; this moment is ephemeral, so enchanting, so elusive, that I could swallow myself in eternal circles trying to replicate it. Knowledge still wears the wreckage of last time like the smash-shattered face of a car-crash survivor.

I feel so powerful in this moment, captivated by my own self-control, that I am startled by the cold, clasping clamp of disappointment’s damp fingers. Disappointment has a thousand eyes, the angry agony-eyes of everyone I pulled down with me; and reflected in them I am nothing but Nero, owning an empire and watching it burn. It holds a calendar of all those many endless months, all those moments I somehow scrambled through when I thought I might not: a calendar torn to confetti and tossed in tatters to the currents of the wind.

All that hard work undone in an instant; obliterated by the irregular hurtling heartbeat of intoxicating infatuation.