Intimate Darkness
You’ve got darkness. It curls around you like a shadow and drapes itself across your shoulders, pulling the corners of your ever-smiling, laughing mouth down. You keep it quiet, on a leash - I don't think anyone else would see it, especially since no one seems to look. But I watch it when you play with the pocket knife you keep in your locker, the one you say calms you down; I hear it when you joke about your miseries being unleashed on the world; I feel it when your fingers tick-tick-tick on the side of a box every time you’re forced to stand still on a particularly rough Monday. I'm almost jealous of how present it is for you, how well it seems to know you, how intimately you keep it in your back pocket. I wish I knew its name and where it came from. I want it to come greet me and tell me all about itself, and after that crawl into my purse to live so you can be as bright all the time as you become now when it gets distracted. I would take it for you, if that were an appropriate thing for me to do.
Since it's not, I hope She is able to help hold it at bay for you. I can see your arms shaking sometimes.