18:00
It’s 6pm on a Saturday night
and you can’t feel you heart beating in your chest
You can’t feel the blood rush around your head, to your liver
Lungs
and back again
You can’t feel the oxygen slide down your throat like it isn’t yours
like you stole it
and you feel kinda lost because you’re so sure you had the correct change when you got to the store
And just like money
you don’t have the energy to beg your landlord for another week in your own body
so you let him pack up your things and take the keys
And your voice is shaking so you don’t trust yourself to speak
Then all of a sudden
at 6pm on a Saturday night
your own body is the coldest place you’ve ever been
My neighbours kept knocking, telling me to keep the noise down;
saying that if I’m going to stay here, I’m going to have to learn not to think so loud
or care so loud
or breathe so loud
And all these words fly at my face so fast
I almost forget that I’m standing in my own God-forsaken house
Now your hands are shaking as you try and shut the door
but all of a sudden it’s 6pm again
and you can’t bring yourself to breathe anymore
and you’d very much like to move out
but you lack the strength to swim to the shore
So you sit in the same room
with off-white walls
and pills to ease your presence
because apparently you wanting to move out is a sickness
a disease or something
you kinda found it hard to listen when he was speaking
and I wish everyone would just stop speaking
take comfort in the noise that is silence
be still long enough to hear their heart beat,
feel their blood
pay for their oxygen
It’s 6am on a Sunday morning
the landlord gave me another week
-Paula Abu