Two-hundred stories, up up and away.

It comes when I'm quiet, sneaks in and blows bottled up hot breath down my neck until my hair prickles and I can't shake the shivers. It blooms into view and occupies the air around me, choking the light from the room like smoke from a hot box and clinging so close my skin glistens with sweat and fear. When I blink, in the split second that my eyes are closed, it taunts me with its sandpaper fingers, leaving red marks and tiny scars along the pink of my limbs. It's there when I sleep, not letting me dream, making me beg for a nightmare so I can jump awake and map an escape route down the hallway, out the front door, and into the cold. When I open my mouth in protest, its there with a fist to push between my lips, choke my words off before they have a chance to crawl out of my throat. I can't describe the colour or the shape of it. I can't tell you if it has a name. Only that its always there now, in the pit of my stomach, the beds of my fingernails, the liquid of my bloodstream. To scare it off, I look through old photo albums for pictures where I'm so happy my teeth show when I smile. I trace the off-white squares of enamel, following the wide arc of my mouth edge-to-edge and remember that there was a time when I didn't need to sneak out the back door at night and wander the pavement until my eyelids touched my toes. I remember the smell of rain as the sun went down, my high tops growing wet and cold and clinging to my feet, carrying me to his house or her party or your bed. When the taste of alcohol was still deliciously foreign and my lungs were spotless and strong. I close my eyes and count footsteps, sorting them into lines and curves, following the cartograpic entrails left behind by my shoes. I catalogue places I've seen, hands I've kissed, strangers I've stared at, past I've made, and mix it all together as proof that I was once somewhere I felt comfortable. Of course, you never factor in the bad bits, or at least in time they grow dull and fade into the back of your mind and fold in on themselves and bury deep. Try as I might, I can't make them sprout into view, therefore, I have nothing to examine that might explain where this feeling comes from. Nothing to explain why I've ended up here again losing sleep and voice and warmth. I am forced to wait it out, let the clouds lift so I can see my way forward again, let the light hit me at an angle where all the shadows fall over my shoulders and litter the pavement behind me.