Trail

Inevitably, what I write will always cast a shadow away from me; sometimes the shadow will carry my incidental silhouette right to my feet; sometimes there will be a long stretch of smoke-like thread spun from the cursive tails of my words to the ball of yarn I hold in my hand. Either way, you can always find your way back to me. Even if I am one to conjure up fortresses and tread behind tall doors, I will always leave a piece of string for Hansel and Gretel and you to eager your way to me.

So even when my words ooze from the soap dispenser and you attempt to wash your hands with them for the last time until the next time, you'll be able to pick up the scent of me as you go about your day, dealing. Over time, you'll become accustomed to it and you'll think it's part of the furniture. I put that chair there, where I sit comfortably, somewhere in a sideroom in your mind where you come to cry and talk about loneliness. There, you smell reassurance, and you leave me with a trail of my words heading out the door. I remain there comfortably. You've come so often, these past few years, and each time I was able to find something to say to you. But nothing that I said really did it; nothing that I said really made you feel like you could leave me where I was, without returning.

I think that everything I told you could have been bottled. But I never gave you a bottle to hold it all in. I'd always given you cracked vials, ones without corks, or even just poured suggestions of your salvation into your cupped hands and watched you scatter away what refused to be held which was really everything. It's why you always came back for more, isn't it? Because you didn't have enough; I never gave you enough. When you pressed me down, I could expel but a breath of hygienic thoughts, though I suppose out there you had to put your hands on the walls and the walls dirtied them.

Despite the words that follow me out of this room, I think I'm getting tired of never leaving, of you always coming back. I realise that I hooked you with my words from the beginning; my yarn took me to your darker version of the world. I followed you in to the point where I could no longer see my own shadow. It's only when I got to a window that I saw I was somewhere in your mind and my words sewed hallways and rooms together into a maze. What was perhaps a patchwork before was now a quilt, a quilt of someone's life I didn't know I'd write.

But now that I have woven myself cleanly into a history of another human being, I'm kind of afraid of pulling out, of unraveling the entire thing, because you tell me, and I can see it, that my words are holding you together. And what I want to let you know is that you can write yourself together, that you don't need me to do it for you, but you keep coming back to this room and I feel responsible for that, like it's a lure, like my being part of the furniture makes you feel at home where really there is but a chair, with a man sitting down holding a ball of yarn, wishing he could unmix his metaphors.