a poem.

The gray cat walked the corridors of the alleyways like shadows creeping up on walls. It was immune to feeling, he thought. Seven days he had felt like this. He hadn’t had a single conscious thought since last Wednesday. He tried. It did not work. She was in the waiting room. He didn’t know when he was to get out. It wasn’t that he did not care; caring ceased to take up the majority of his thoughts. And he thought like he was on pot but wasn’t—he had never taken drugs recreationally. Emotion doesn’t even begin to describe the things that he was feeling. It was a rawness he could not handle. It was a slumber he could not wake from, a dream that did not end and consequently became a nightmare. That was the extent of his feelings and he did not want to talk about it anymore. Because talking about it wouldn’t necessarily make it worse but it would bring it out into the open and then he couldn’t hide it or put up his walls. When he did come to his senses he felt presence—a sense of being in this world—a body that he could not escape and consequently made him happy. What did that word mean to him? It was hard to fathom the depth of his friends’ caring about him. He trusted them deeply. He had a support network that could not fail. He had just talked to Rachel and told her his thoughts. And this was his way of coping with the world. He needed people to feel alive. He needed to write about them to feel alive, their mistakes and errors that gave him a sense of compassion for what they were going through. The gray cat climbed the walls with his shadows. And it was the one that he was waiting for. Morosely the eyes fell unto being and never left. The cat loved him and he loved the cat.