The calvalcade of drops upon groomed plastic sound out a brief march as the withered breeze shakes me. We have left the window, my housemate and I, open since mid-september. Even as it rains and the chill of autumn sneaks in and makes the bathroom more unbearable by the day, neither of us close it. It’s out of a kind of stubbornness I suppose, I don’t want to give up the summer, the empty loving summer. Last summer had been bloated, full of life and yet unlife, like the walking cadaver botched relations. My hands have grown cold, clutching the towel that is far to small for me. I’ve always liked the huge ones that my parents bought, the kind that could cover your whole body like a blanket. I don’t know why I didn’t take one when I moved down here, guess it’s a bit like the window. Almost out of clothes. Well, not really, I have a whole basket full of clean ones, but they didn’t finish drying and all of them reek of mildew and neglect. So I’m wearing shorts, and its freezing. Well…seventy degrees. So yes, for me, freezing. The indistinct shaking of the fan in my room beckons me back to bed. I spent all day today in bed, after going into work for two hours. I don’t want to say, but I think it’s happened, the switchover that is. I’ve never seen such a quick movement that I can remember, but let’s just say I’ve never discounted the possibility. There’s always been the three aspects of Keith, as I tell everyone whom I begin to get close to, it’s a warning and a mark of pride, kind of like that scar you got when you played that stupid prank on your neighbors and got hurt in the process. I don’t feel empty, or dead, or whatever other things one typically feels when depression hits. I do feel those things, but I wouldn’t describe them that way. They certainly don’t have words, but that is also an attempt for me to constrain them with words. I feel. Let us leave it at that. It’s like a light in your mind, not white, not grey either. It doesn’t have a color per se, like many things in my life, I associate it with a temperature, a kind of feel that I can remember. It feels cool but not cold, like slate. A moment popped into my head, from a few nights ago. Molly, my girlfriend, more or less challenged my association between my poetry and feeling disturbed. She questioned the validity of that. It feels like a competition sometimes, between us, of who can be more fucked up. She wouldn’t even allow me to call her my girlfriend. If she knew I typed that she’d probably feel a little angry. And maybe she isn’t my girlfriend, we haven’t been calling it that. I’ve been striving for it, I don’t even know if we’re there. We spend wonderful times together, but they too, feel... cool. We’ve both grown up scared, of different things of course, but scared. It’s hard to tell someone or even know it for yourself, that you love them, when you’re scared. Perhaps in a similar way, I’ve been scared not to tell her. My desperate desire turns every moment into the moment, or at least it tries. You know those scenes, typically found in those heroic action movies, when everything suddenly goes into slow motion, and there is some kind of sorrowful slow song accompanying it? It’s a moment of tragedy and triumph, when the hero loses his best friend and charges with futility into the enemy, or the last moment between two dying lovers. I seek to transform every moment into that moment. Sure it may be constructed, by why risk one single moment in your lifetime that doesn’t feel like that. There’s an Against Me! (yes I know how very sell-out) song with the line ‘I’d rather go our separate ways I don’t feel anything, unless we’re living and dying for eachother, every second of our lives.’ Sometimes, just for a moment, I feel that in a more succinct, more powerful way. Looking into Molly’s eyes will literally, for a moment or two, make me want to forget everything else. Every single thing, the weight of my own body, my desire to kiss her, the memory of friends, family, all my dreams, all my hurts, all my wants, all my needs. All those things are gone, and there is just her and me. I’m not even sure if there is a me; I feel dissolved and peaceful. Whether it has been or not, I’ve always approached my life and lived it as a battle. I’m contrary and oftentimes lead by conflict for the sheer sake of it. There’s a nameless rage that rules my actions. But every winter, at a time like this, it dies, or goes into hibernation, and all I’m left with is…the cool. I slept all day today. I don’t even want to write this but I’m forcing myself to, so I can feel like I’ve done something. I’m not sure if I’m tired, all I know is that I don’t want to do anything. It’s all this vague feeling of being indistinct, of occupying that space in the clouds where one doesn’t differentiate between up and down. I’m worried too, not paralyzed by it, but watching my worry, as if it sits in nervous agitation across the room in my chair. When I imagine worry, I see my friend Valerie. She worries about me. Maybe not as much as my mother, but my mother hides it. She has to, because she knows if I know she’s worried, I’ll get upset. Val worries as she should, a nameless fuzzy worry. She’s not anxious as to whether I’ll do something to destroy my life or anything that drastic, she just doesn’t want to see me drop into serious melancholy. Or more accurately, for me to recognize my melancholy, one of the things that I do not confront in my life.

eeeemmmmoooooo.