missing you

There are degrees of missing you. 

First I don’t, not at all. Not even your smile, not even your hands. This is when I feel like dancing, like reading, when I wake up in the morning and my smile greets me in the mirror. 

Slowly the smile fades into an ache for you, a gasp for air, calling into question my being enough. When I feel the ghost of your arms around me and wonder why I am always cursed, if these hands will always haunt me, always want me. 

From the ache grows a fever. A shriveling that makes my fists clench and my bones scream until my body is convulsing and I exist only in your memories.  My fever burns through my brain to the very top of my skull, where it settles, like a crown. 

In the burning I hold an absolute focus, anything relieving the pressure building behind my eyes. I am left smoking and cracking. Oftentimes I cannot speak, I cannot, I heap myself here broken. 

The fire leaves ashes, brilliantly red underneath grey. They singe my skin, and where warm hands once touched now lives a beast, a festering wound so blackened and brayed.