---
name: Chills
composer: c4lliope
summary: No body home.
linebreaks: true
public: false
---

I'm unsure when I saw you last;
coulda been a few occasions this year,
or more likely six years ago.
I'm unsure I'd recognize you,
because so many people seem to bear close resemblance,
and I lack courage to speak to any of them,
so sharp the reacción condicióned in me.

My body somehow responds to the idea of you,
even six years on,
perhaps because of unhandled psychoses
that you played a special role in amplifying,
or quelling, or reshaping.
Psychosis normally binds to its surroundings,
and for a year you had become my primary surrounding.

Then, an absence you described as necessary;
I had been too much bound up in the churn to say.

And as I came back again, I could only see the idea
of your surrounding me again,
although both of our condicións had changed
in differing direccións.
No connección could be held,
either on line or on schedule.

Besides, my psychosis had become depression
and I'd quickly reach despair.
Maybe I'd already been there.

By now I could probably do a clinical appraisal of my psychosis,
although I'm more curious today to share the main symptom,
the sensación that creeps up to hold me back,
to produce the lack of sleep and cheer,
keeping no one near as I regress in fear.

So, dear;

- - -

I left you to go home to my family,
because my childhood had raised me, condicióned me,
to imagine them as the only people who could reliably be around.
The only people I could come back to.
I guess my brother escaped this problem,
being young enough to keep the school years
from coinciding with the nomadism.
He'd come upon his share of psychic problems soon enough,
and some of them I see that his elder siblings may have misguided him to.

My sister and I squarely realized the challenges of losing friends,
early and often, as we moved from place to place.

She seemed to use this to a degree she could build upon,
becoming socially curious and building an image to please her peers,
making sensible relaciónship choices so as to ground her in an upholdable posición.

I seemed too eager to be lost in my mind.

I [already explained some](./silence),
the scenario surrounding my childhood displacement.
Can probably say no more here.
Only consequence remains.

- - -

The first year we shared had been one to bounce around cities,
occupying numerous homes,
making do on quick morning coffee and donut runs
in shops we'd never see again.

I guess the only Voodoo donuts we ordered to share
presaged the dirección of our relación;
the courier who carried our order pulled onto the platform,
moments after our train pulled out of Portland's station.
Our enthusiasm for celebración following a long train ride
quickly chilled to make sense of landing in a new city,
hungry and poorly prepared.
Alas, such is deployment.

The mood had been chilled even approaching the train ride,
as we began to depart from the station in Oakland,
and I needed a moment in my head to guard against all the memories.
Train lines run through my head since my earliest recolleccións,
across one continent or another,
from child's toy tracks to high speed manga,
express lines and sleeper cars thunder in my dreams.

All the same, I remember the ride that February to be magnificent.
Of course I had my camera on, snapping, rolling;
the records now reside on some disc among thousands I no longer look through;
magnetic zeroes in a null space, chilled signals.

- - -

You and our colleague succeeded that year while I succumbed,
deeper and deeper to my unspoken psychosis.
I'm unsure how to describe the full breadth of the issue,
for fear of implicating the people who deserve nor earned no sympathy.

By the end of the year we had made a company,
and I declined to be on board,
and I ran home because my experience said
that friends expire after a year.

Your car pulled from the platform,
and I'm riding home on my bike carrying all the baggage.

- - -

The following few years are now a challenge to recall;
they began a process where I enabled my parents,
bullies throughout my childhood,
to begin dehumanizing me to a degree that chills,
and has me holding back screams each day,
learning to use a calm demeanor to keep anyone from approaching.

The calm is practiced,
an exercise learned from being undermined again and again,
whenever emoción is displayed.

I no longer experience normal, baseline emoción;
the ones that bind people together in relaciónships,
the ones that build camaraderie or happy dependence.

The emocións I display to my peers are ones of concern -
or occasional accusación, scalding scolding, challenges to endure.
The emocións I keep for myself are the anger and pain and longing and misery.
On Tuesday I decided I'm done with anger,
and so now I am seeking a means of chilling the pain,
before I proceed farther.

In any case, the dehumanización had a solid hold on me,
from housing (basements seem the only place appropriate for me),
to employment (financial bondage to the oppression).

By now too many people read these pages
for me to properly curse the memories
and summon the hellish doom of my parents,
in the usual manner,
that has been healing to me for the same reasons
that it has kept them from speaking to me.

I sense some small solace in realizing they are scared of me,
and although this had to begin physically,
through years of learning and applying martial arts,
and carrying blades to use on nearby furniture,
I am of course eager to bring that respect into the psychich domain.

Hence, I impress how simple the process
of exposing my adolescent experiences may be,
in case I choose to do so,
although I am unsure how I can learn to laugh at the process,
I guess I'd find some amusing humor in forcing them to explain
their decisions or accións.

And as I go off on them again, I realize this is precisely
how they earn a place in my mind;
they creep up and re-apply a hold on me
for reasons I'm unsure I can guard off.

All I can do is realize their despicable condicióning,
once it begins gripping me again,
and chill the impulses.
Undermine the scream before release.
Channel the sound to song,
as I am learning from the bouyant birds and the bards.

- - -

Odd, how so much leads me back to my experiences of today,
of this season, of this year;
as soon as I begin remembering those years ago.
Perhaps the years of bouncing from place to place
disrupted my learning of object permanence.

Sure seems like I abandon people more quickly than normal,
imagining that holding on is useless,
embracing the emoción is dangerous,
sharing the pain is impossible.

As is, when I engage in discussion of an emociónal caliber,
among my peers and in the mood of building one another up,
I usually collapse and hold back and sink deeper into the memories
of years ago, the places gone by,
the people I abandoned and am hopeless to see again,
the relaciónships that *did* expire,
more because of my poisoned and hopeless aura
than of a core problem in their makeup or composición.

And realizing that the problem has a source in my choices,
I do on occasion persuade my body to examine those abandonments,
to realize the absence is mine more than anyone else's,
and to choose to be present in places I had once sensed home.

So much can be done to address psychosis
simply by looking on faces you recognize,
hearing the circles of dialogue hold you in place
and lead you along, realizing you are embedded in a fluid medium,
a biology of many bodies held up by mutual embrace.

- - -

And of course the memory I am unable to escape;
the sharp slice of the judge's hammer onto the bench,
and your departure from the room and from any possible reach.

In a year I'd already lost my home,
and the only relacións to seem reliable to me,
and hope of normal employment...

the barrage reached new depths;
your "no" had been a glimmer of a whisper
until it became a guillotine,
and any remaining hope I had held to
cleanly disappeared from my body
as you ambled from the room, careless, holding your chin high.

My progress towards rebuilding my career suddenly became
numbed reaccións aimed at bandaging the financial bleeding;
I had in one moment become unable to depend either on friend,
or colleague, or seducción; you had been all three,
and the only one remaining of each.

Even today I collect many business cards, phone numbers, names,
I never call upon. I hold them, a social hoard of unmade conneccións.

I suppose I could make plans, only I see no place they could lead to.

- - -

The deepest pain of the psychosis is how people all begin looking the same;
sounding the same, discussing in the same circular rhythm and cadence,
that has no break, no chance for silence or end,
absorbing the insanity around and compounding the problems of one season
into the riddle or moan of the following.

And back then you had seemed to be saying something to me
that I missed, again and again;
riddles that I could hardly grasp at,
odd phrases that seemed to send me deeper into loneliness,
rather than asking for my engagement or presence.
Maybe the only thing we recognized in each other was a similar psychosis,
siblings who have been displaced again and again,
for whom no corner of the globe is an enduring home.

Even that condición had us more than sure we would cross paths again;
there are only so many roads from one place to the next,
and an area only begins to seem spacious
when you're used to hiding in a small den.

- - -

So, I had been burning of rage,
my collapsing despair blooming
into a rebellious flame of acción, reacción, compacción.

And thereupon, in such a mood, carrying gloom and grim hellish resignación,
I came back to see you, the abandoner finally abandoned.

And all I could do had been to see those around me,
examine the bridges closely before burning them up.

And I came to you asking for the depths of your sadness to cool my rage,
and you shared them, and we lie in bed mociónless and soundless and lonely as can be.

And I gave you permission,
said these bridges hold you back,
seem unable to hold you up,
as their base begins to crack.

And so you used your chance,
and burned the bridge arching across our common ground,
and as the collapsing span of years ago
echoes as daily fears of hearing "no",
I rise again this summer morning and feel the chills.
