The Friends I Don't Deserve. in And The Rest.

A thousand apologies wire shut my jaws, a mouthful of burrs with their bramble-wire claws; unspoken tokens of regret to everyone I ever met: eternally, I owe such debt, to their refusal to forget.

Sometimes I’m a shadow smoke-screen of a person, subsumed by a tomb of complete introversion, shallow-drowned in cold inertia: a cyclical catastrophe, collapsing into atrophy- the lifelessness of laxity- consumed by my capacity to lie supine in apathy, just passively disintegrating; curling inward, hibernating: slowly stoically stagnating.

A recipe for lethargy, a bitter burnt-out effigy; some days there’s nothing left of me but slow descent to entropy; resigned to capsize into drawn-out demise- ossified, preoccupied; a vanquished void behind my eyes- I listlessly drift through identikit days: a machine of routine run on baseline malaise. The peripheral fear that I’m falling apart thunders tracks through my veins on a quarter-horse heart… yet I spend my life motionless, running away, as I lazily languish in torpid decay.

Too often I’m the absent friend, in mute pursuit of my own ends; a spineless victim of myself, a hostage to my mental health- ashamed of my proclivity for living in captivity; a cage of inactivity- too shame-faced to articulate the dire desire to hibernate: to lie down and asphyxiate beneath my own repulsive weight, to cave in and capitulate; confined inside convulsive hate.

I deserve to rot in isolation, a vacuum of my own creation… yet faultless friends I didn’t earn refuse to let the bridges burn: they overlook my aberrations, all my inward inclinations- without a doubt or hesitation, no hint of hurt interrogation, not a flicker of frustration- these paragons of perfect patience offer open invitations, include me in their celebrations, initiate all conversations… a loyalty void of limitations.

A thousand times I knew perhaps, I’d let a precious friendship lapse- collapsed into the silent cracks of all my disappearing acts, as passages of time elapsed… I don’t know what can be in me they seem to see so differently- I’m only deadwood and debris, a waste of space, a nobody; an eremitic absentee: an archetypal suicidal; self-centred, indolent and idle- too ashamed to explain, and yet time and again, they waive the right to denigrate, berate or excommunicate a selfish social profligate: on day release from Notre Dame, I fall straight in to waiting arms; the safe embrace of faithful friends, whose selfless patience never ends.

Guilty and humbled, it’s so hard to show it… but I owe them my world, and I hope that they know it.