I am trying to understand when things become other things – when does a pull become a push – in the background I heard the words read aloud from yesterday’s storybook “suddenly, it was winter”, as though these things suddenly happen, but perhaps they do, who am I to say – you said I woke you up laughing twice in my sleep last night – I awoke aroused, bright, moon-doused, excited, but by the time I had returned from the sea I was other, wondering when sadness suddenly becomes depression – when anxiety becomes addiction – when one thing takes a sinister slide into the next and all is changed – there seems to be an order of things, and I know they know what I mean, the voices wafting from the speaker across the room, towards the stove for me to stir their melancholy into my morning drink – these mystic, mournful women, my kin, they fill dark pools for me to drown in, and the spaciousness of sound and what is not sung or said let me know, Diane Cluck Jenny Hval Alela Diane, sad sisters of mine, you know this grey matter that fills every room – tears fill my eyes and have me thinking, ah, I feel too much to be depressed, but it took an inordinate amount of will to get dressed and anyway how would I know what normal feels like, I have only known well-worn pathways of desire designed to anesthetize, that I cannot live without, more than I can count – stove-side, stirring, steam fills me like a fog, I cannot grasp whatever thread I went to bed with about who I am or where I am going, but this fog is so many unwritten pages all being read aloud to me at once, I can’t think for wanting to get them out, I can’t dress for being stuffed with leaves, I can’t look into your eyes for the hunger of me – wanting blank space, and time – and my friends, depression and anxiety, ever bestowing upon me the weight of could, would, should be – the elusive masterpiece that wants me to breathe it into being if only I could stop hopping over fences into faraway fields –so much time I’ve spent scrubbing boots, mending stockings, memorizing maps, remembering the names of foreign trees – stay still, young one, stay still, and spill.