inches

She wonders why friends don't have time anymore. She's asked them,
but there weren't any real answers. Just a gradual tapering off of time spent together.

She knows she tends to feel abandoned so she mitigates their silence by trying to suck up the hurt into a gift wrapped package with a big read denial bow. Denial bows are always red, you know.

But truth is just too fragrant a scent, a spice, a honeysuckle dream, to resist for long, and mendacity is too putrid to her now, a decayed, malicious thing, a darkness detrimental to life.

So she tries to understand their fear. It's fear, fear of pain, fear of anger, fear of truth that make people turn away from each other. It's terror in the face of the unknown.

She sees it's too plain for most, but not poetic enough to describe the deep, abiding darkness of not knowing. She lives in that ebony unfolding, that constant pain, that forced smile, that sense of always falling.

Some can't face the pain in her face, the edge in her voice, the stumble in her step, the scalp showing through the falling fur, the body bursting with it's own malice, dis ease. The now constant throb behind the eyes. It's hard for them to watch her have to reach deeper into a darkened trough to find the sprigs of delight that make life worth continuing to live.

So they turn away--a gradual lessening. The everyday shrinks to now and again and then to not at all.

She has her bouts of doubts--is it too much to ask, is it too much to bear, is it too much to face, is is too much to not know--but, really, she doesn't have a choice and envies them theirs.