You're waking, you're walking - it's good to know something can move you the way I did some years ago, though all I feel haunting this room is a shell I once knew (could it really be you?). You're careless on purpose. You stumble on nothing 'til I'm forced to rearrange everything. You shrink from the motion of my hand extending to offer you help with your steps, a ghost of conviction that needs no attention from me. Your pacing keeps shaking the floorboards beneath me - in some ways it's like we still touch, or talk, or something.

The second hand locks its wrist to the clock in protest of forward progression. Put nails in the frame of the door 'til the days quit their restless and incessant knocking.

Your drinking's more frequent - a traded addiction - relationships can't wet your lips. Your bruises aren't healing, though I doubt that you're feeling a thing, it's so cold in this house. The colors are draining from anything you dare to touch with your perilous stares. You speak without purpose - a necklace of curses still hangs from a tack on my wall. I place it there nightly. Its weight is too heavy to bear while I'm trying to sleep. But early each morning I don your appointments as if they were heavenly crowns.

And I dirty my knees in efforts to please, but your spirit just passes on through me. Yet my pleas bind your will by insisting you're ill and you're pale and you're tired and I love you. How can I make you stay if you're thinking each day that beyond me lies something you're missing? I'll turn callers away, tell your friends you're ok. Though you're suffering, at least you're still mine.