No Way Back

Nothing seems real. The cold evening wind stinging the eyes and through a watery squint, a blurred parade of lights bounce and fracture on wet streets sending splinters into glazed eyeballs. The air strops its edges on bare cheeks until the skin is numb. Shadows cower in vacated corners. All sense of self pulls back into the warmth of a padded coat, the head hooded within its own muffled enclave. I feel like a space suited visitor to an alien world, cut off, a trespasser on territory that is not my home. I often feel like this, hidden beneath layers, at times struggling to breathe the alien air, ungainly in such a weighted world with no way back to wherever I came from.