I don’t know.
A day in every month, I do not know.
Know what, I shrug, not even that I know.
I cough but it isn’t blood I see spilling up from my guts, an endless push coming forth. It isn’t that. It isn’t the vomit that surges as the nerves of my stomach gag. A reflex. I do not know of, because that wasn’t it.
It wasn’t that of hoarse throats and empty winter nights that beg for warmth to come at midnight between the silk sheets; her thighs are shivering. But that is not today. That is now how she feels. And she cannot put the words in paper thoughts. She cannot run from it, it doesn’t go.
Every month it is not her 28 day schedule that strikes. It is nothing she can ration.
Every month there is a day she remembers him but that is not the feeling of him that seeps through her thoughts, stripping her naked of all viable security. That is still not it. She thinks and thinks and knows it will not stop today.
It will sleep within her growing and maybe only the taste of it on her tongue will last the morning after.
She does not know how to rest her head and let it go.
She just dissolves in thought, the salt, her skin, peels off in memories, water, that washes off what didn’t exist in her past.
He is there.
She is shivering.
He offers his jacket, she gets colder.
He holders her, she is still the same.
She walks away, and there she finds some comfort that is agonizing.
She learns how to rest her head without the colors in her mouth.
She rests.
She dives deeper.
She looks to the side and wonders, will she ever be better?
beyond 