Hold What You Have

These days, almost everything feels like tears.  I can feel tears in my throat.  Hot and tight.  I can feel them warm and wet in my eyes.  I can feel tears in the way I bite my lower lip to draw my mind’s attention to an easier pain.  I can feel them in my stomach after I swallow them down.  I can feel tears in the precise way my fingers move over the keyboard.  Movement as a kind of self-medication.  I can feel tears in their absence from my pillow when I wake at night and curl into the alone-ness that I tell myself is comfortable just because I like the way my blankets feel on my skin.  These days, almost everything feels like tears because I’m almost always holding some back and because some things aren’t as easy to hold onto as tears.