Cough

 I am awake beneath my heavy duvet.
 It is dark all around me.
 7:30 p.m.
 A new kind of cellophane.
The depression is thick. I speak into the curtain of it. Existence dissipates; dissolves before my belly rises again, retaliates against the heaviness. I breathe a hesitant trust into the silence. We have built some rapport.
 They don't know.
 They always know.
 It is safe to assume at this point.
Sometimes I feel my writer dying inside me. She writhes and struggles through the sleep paralysis. Her will to live quakes. She is a rattling colic ricochetting beneath the trapdoor of my innocence. She is buried alive. She is scraping out. She cracks my ribcage trying to come above. I wonder if Christ breathes into her like the valley of dry bones while I dream haunting things.

 Sometimes it is the good dreams that stain the most.

 When I sleep my grandmother is still alive. Her smell permeates me as I bury my nose into her moist, lotioned check. Her gold jewelry glistens in the warm light of a holiday. I am not sure which holiday. I just know it is one because she is breathing. I study the bumps on the outsides of her pinkies where her sixth and eleventh finger once was. I consider that she might have been an even better seamstress had she kept them. She takes the champagne colored bottle of Halston from her mahogany dresser and sprays it. I study the particles of fragrance cascading from the high places through beams of light. We are showered in something timeless. Something potent. Something real.
 We are magnificent.
 She in her cells.
 I in mine.
 When I use my grandmother's perfume I feel a certain invincibility.
 It is like I am carrying a legacy; bold femininity,
 The kind of femininity that my grandfather loved.
 The kind of femininity my generation has abandoned.
 I am lonely in this.
 But she is there, stitching together my belly and my insides the way she always has. I am the work of her hands in the good dreams.
 But the bad dreams come too.
 The church tells me it is not wise to curse myself in fear, or in wonder of the demons that lurk and haunt in the night. "Don't speak them into existence," they say. Maybe they are all just figments of my imagination. Alzheimers, diabetes, hypochondria, bipolar disorder, cervical cancer-all creaking doors and cooing creatures mourning in my bloodstream.
 I just hope if the forgetting comes, I will have someone in my life to rattle me back to the reality I created with them. I hope I make great love to someone somewhere, someday. I hope for a family. I ache for gardens sown; that something is birthed in my wake, some strung symphony that scatters and collects like pearls on a string that clasp delicately together at the end.

 I reconcile with the vapor I know I am.

 Every day I acknowledge that I am staring down the barrel of a gun. We are exchanging each breath for something. I just want all my breaths and my somethings to be worthwhile. I try to collect the day in my chest. My unwillingness to exhale is killing me. I am made up of bold stinginess.
 Is there anyone out there still alive? Anyone not completely consumed by the chase? Anyone not driven solely by the hunger of their own flesh? Is there anyone of substance, dignity, poetry or music wandering too?
 I just want to sit with you through it. We can say everything or nothing and just let the gravity of silence consume us.
 It is agonizing to be alive in a world that completely takes life for granted. To die and to be aware of it is better than the autopilot everyone seems to be steeping themselves in. I wish the fibers of technology would fray. I wish we could be left with flickering candles and a warm light diffusing itself into all of our scared and vacant rooms. Then the shrill echoes of our realities would remind us we are eternal spirits in temporal wombs-

That we are purposed to create, to give birth to something far greater than ourselves.

 Heaven is here and it's coughing itself up
 From tattered lungs,
 Aching to sprawl forth.
 If I had a rope I'd hoist it up out of me
 Until the bones and teeth of it came into fruition.

 I am dying to come awake.
 I am dying to come awake.
 I am dying to come awake.