Just Looking On

Don't turn away but plot its points by how much it plummets downward into all those dark places you've been. Measure the miles of numbness that stretch across time, the weight crushing down on those evenings when it was hard just to breathe. Let the thick cling of what wound tight around you, the binding you couldn't quite name, be unwrapped and its length counted out in footsteps. Calculate the volume of what it takes to fill so much of a life, then gather it up and label it - This Is Not Me - but that someone you blindly chose, or was told to be. All this time you've been following two steps behind, just looking on.