My heart had never fluttered so, nor flew so high.

The moments, memories, images that were so real, so possible are now a faded shade of grey, unknown, untasted, unattainable.

Lost now, in a maze of my own making, not even sure if there's an exit or the will to try and find it.

The vines on the wall, constricting, comforting, closing me off.

Holding me still as I change, as I fall away.

What was once a sensation of endless flight, freedom and limitless emotion darkens now, plunging downwards, spiraling towards restrictions, limits and losses but still with limitless, almost bottomless, emotion.

Always.

It's times like these, standing alone on the highway, my face only inches away from the grills of passing trucks and passenger vehicles, whistling tunes of yesterdays to myself as I idly reminisce about the person that used to be before the operations and knives and before the scars and pain when I say aloud in a voice so timid as to almost amount to nothing, my true feelings at the time all about that which was said to me once long ago when grass was a greener shade of dead, those two tiny words forever etched in my being, "more coffee?"

Between these little lights found in your eyes entire galaxies arise and fall like waves on an ocean of string. Maybe in the moment that the light is broken by the darkness you'll realize that we'd been right all along, that in the time it takes to fight what we fear, we could instead together make peace with that fear and share in something wholly different and in many ways more than anything which alone could be said.