::Wrapping::

  The shades of yesterday don't hold me tight. I wash my hair. I let the scabs on my face fall, and am undisturbed by much. There is an empty tinge to the looking back these days. Perhaps in winter I freeze my excess away. I let the world know things that will shut me out of it. I act silently. I say little and much all at the same time. I make myself the bad one for you to to cut off. I let you hate me because it will keep you away. I let you hate me because it's easier than thinking about what it is you do, are, and are about. There is a time for caring. There is a time to caress. There is a time to push everything else aside and just be the security blanket. I am hard and warm like crystal. I know what I have been to you.
   I have a way of letting the world forget itself. Forget what it wants, what it was doing, what I mean to it. I have a way of giving myself up to create a comfort cave for others. As time and relationship and love all create this spiral of me I am still growing. Layer under layer under layer there is still more me. More ways to love, and relate. More ways to stick by as the time stretches itself out between us. Things can happen in the middle. Somewhere between the hours and the days I begin to chime. The alarm bells begin to ting.
  The desire for sameness turns my head around. I can't be the same thing twice. I can express the same thought in the same way more than once. I can't be this creature that stops peeling the layers because there is so much more of me that needs to be let out. The skins of my past will constantly unfurl themselves. Opening themselves up to the new. New ways to love and relate. New ways to lose myself. New ways to see yesterday.
   In life we are all betrayers. We pray and hope for longevity. We crave the steady job, a constant care, loves that don't die, friends that stay best forever. We crave the simplicity of forever. That all we know will always be there and be the same. That we have something just ours that signifies what we are worth in the world in a way that doesn't change. I get cold and harder edged. Forever isn't something I crave. I crave the knowing. The honest moment. The real. What's real is that all things change. What's real is that I made a choice one night. I chose to stop loving you the way I did. I don't need sameness, but fairness would be kind. As I pull out the layers and layers of me, of the past, of the truth it made things easier. It makes all this true. I can stop. I have stopped. I have washed you out of me.
    The stains of what was our life will never sparkle, and they shouldn't. I try to hold the parts of you that are clear and perfect. I try to hold the parts of us that are truly love and transcendent. A new year hits things hard. I rinse my scabs everyday. I wear them out, unbandaged to feel the sting of the cold air. I've never been really good at holding on to many people. I am gifted at letting them make me the villain. I do what I can to let them hate me at the end, so they don't have to face my truths, my words, my judgement. I let them define the time to go, so I can slip away and forget. Forget everything that we were and are in the world. Forget the feelings, the history, the life of whatever we did, were doing, would ever possibly do.
   I wrap myself up, in layer upon layer of me. It's an emotional hibernation of sorts. The comfort of my own coolness pleases me. My eyes turn wistful and inwardly dreamy. I'll cocoon myself inside myself and redraw my heartlines. I will be new again when the scabs all fall away. I'll have no memory of what mattered today because tomorrow there will be more. More time, more love, more ways to relate in the newness beneath these layers.