you get tired. exhausted by minor trivialities - misunderstood verbs and sleeping on couches - you want unconciousness, but your mind is still as a boiling sea and confusion beats against your frontal lobe in the shape of waves. you toss and turn in an unsafe place, trying to sleep because it's too late to pack up and go. and when sleep comes, it comes for an hour at a time, interrupted to easily by the ticking of the clock or the fall of a footstep on the other side of the earth, riddled with dreams of familiar names and situations that leave you uneasy, unable to deny the psychological secrets revealed by dragging the ocean of your subconscious.

so you seek the fights you've fought before, give the speeches you memorized in high school, because among strangers it doesn't matter. and it makes you feel whole, like you are trying to sort through the knots and weave your way back to stability. but the mistake is to grasp at the tenuous strings. they break off in your hands and reveal themselves to be no more useful than throwing stones at the clouds. burrowing deeper, the questions - the real ones - the questions you ignore shoot roots into your memories and your analytical abilities, leaving you to wonder, 'was it always like this?' or 'what is pi when the world is ending?'

summoning the demons back up, reuniting the dialouges already chronicled to be performed again, does nothing because you coddle the precious trespasses and try to be gentle, more gentle, this time and soon it's nothing more than abstraction and you can't remember what you fought for. all the same, your guts feel frozen and your eyes won't focus on anything tangible but stare as though the answer was hidden in furniture or walls and with continued attention will be forced out by the pressure of a gaze.

when it's said, it's said. and there are no undoings or explanations or chemicals, sold on late night infomercials, to repair the damage. so you keep to yourself for while and let it slowly slip, and never speak of it again.