Written in Grey

A bowl of cereal sits perched precariously on the corner of the couch,
The blue, yellow, green popping in white,
Leeching color into the void,
A steady drip-dripping of tears
Running down my face
Making their way into the bowl,
Adding salt to sugar.

The deafening silence
Of the room, a droning of the TV,
Some inane babble
Piercing my ears with the mundane.

Around the room,
Senselessly scattered remains of our life,
A constant reminder of my hopes,
My devotion,
Now called into question,
Taken, chewed up, rolled around your mouth,
And spat back at me in disgust.

Next to me, an image sits.
A pair of arms, curled into a blanket,
Telling me a random fact,
Or a multi-step thought out of the blue,
But the blue is gray,
And it shifts to green
As the vortex begins.
I brace for...

My heart,
A crushing, piercing weight,
Sending knives and spears careening into me.
A screaming of "what if?" and "what have I done wrong?"
Failing to push out through the blanket of silence.

My brain,
On fire as it drowns,
Awash in theories and lost hope,
Ablaze at the bottom of the sea,
A battlefield of constant contradiction,
Desperately searching for the pieces it wants to glue back together,
But perhaps the vase was never whole.

I am a tree,
Buffeted by hail,
Lost a limb or two, but growing back...
Struck by lightning, able to rebuild...
Eaten slowly from the inside, "act like everything's okay"...
A wildfire, a flood, tearing at my roots, burning new growth...
A hurricane, "don't hold on"...
"I am hurting too," says God
As he sends cataclysm toward
The timber on the ground...

I shiver from the cold on the couch.