Fireflies

What can I offer you on this fine night?

My fears are catching up to your orders faster than I could jot it down. They serve you better than the person they are contained in, and I will soon find myself unjustifiable and useless.

As much as I want this to work as much as you, I feel like I’m blurring my own boundaries, staining the ground with dust and debris until I have another fort wrapped around me. It’s another case of “right place, wrong time”, except the blueprint has long been burned to ashes.

How do I reverse engineer this well-structured defense mechanism, when I’ve lost all the tools to undo the damage done to me?

I’m misunderstanding these legible lines as tongue twisters — a game of Jenga with every brick is as thin as two-word riddles with a million answers. Second guessing and playing hard to get stop being hobbies of the heart, and more like hot knives slicing through bone.

How can I rectify this gesture of hope if the quagmire of thoughts that keep me hostage a thousand feet deep beneath the soil shackle my hands to the center of the earth? I have no answers, no questions, nothing. Just empty thoughts becoming emptier, as fear feeds me a convincing five-course meal of lies.

I’m itching to come up with a MacGyver-esque solution to this equation written in tongues of fire. The less sense it makes, the higher the success rate — and that’s exactly what I hate.

I pull this arrow back, hoping I hit bullseye. But for every chance as saccharine sweet as this, I put the arrow back in my quiver. I force the horse to swallow its untimely gift. I look away, and never look back.

I never take that chance, no matter how deceivingly bright it is.

I’m afraid of locking myself in place, not knowing if time is gold to them as it is to me. There have always been better opportunities for bliss I’ve lost in struggles for two, where only one happens to survive. A two-legged race, except it’s a game designed in Saw fashion where I happen to be the amputee, so that the other can run free. Intuition and the signs from above tell me that this is one more promise I can make for the better.

The truth is that it’s always a flip coin when it comes to who breaks it first.

Perhaps these are all scenarios of pain I project onto the big screen. Admission is free, and it’s a movie everyone can see. It has no director nor crew, just two biologically faulty cameras sewn by muscle onto a skull no thicker than thin glass.

I am the only audience it has, and here I am, giving it a zero on all marks.

Grief follows me home, wherever that may be. It is an unwelcome guest, and yet it refuses to leave on command. It’s hard enough that we never see eye-to-eye, two metaphysical parallel lines fighting for what we think is right. What more if I open my doors to people who might be wolves in sheep’s wool, sharpening claws to tear me in half.

What do I do with wasted time?

Now I perform one more soliloquy for the unnerved, hoping I get a logically sound solution, and not a reckless goodbye.

I only get one chance every time I see sparks fly. My heart doubts this every time, but it cannot help but oblige.

Sometimes I face this dance, wondering if they can see the stars I kept in my eyes, but as it turns out, it’s been ages since I shattered my jar of fireflies.