The Piece I'm Missing

I moved out.
I’m on my own,
As alone as you can be
When you’re sharing
A cardboard box of a room
With a stranger—
And I miss the past.
I miss my cat,
And I miss my family,
And I miss my friends,
And, perhaps most of all,
I miss myself.
I miss the feeling of
Knowing that I’m real,
But then again—
I don’t know if that’s
Something I’ve ever felt.
Live in the moment, they say,
Be in the moment,
And Damn it, I'm trying!
I’d give anything
To say that I was,
That I am—
But each moment dissolves
In the pause between heartbeats
Like fog burnt away
By the first rays of dawn.
I feel like I’m going crazy,
Or maybe I already have—
In the time it takes
My tears to fall
I’m half convinced
That I was never crying at all
And I made it all up…
Or maybe it’s me that’s all made up.
I’m made up of fragments
Crumbling at the edges
So they’ll never fit together the same way again
But the irony is—
I don’t even know if they fit together before.
Before is a concept more than a concretion;
I know that it happened because
The proof is staring back at me from the mirror,
Except sometimes I think
That I’m the one trapped behind the glass,
Bloodying my fists
In a futile effort
To experience my life firsthand.
But I’m stuck in the passenger seat
Feeling it slip through my fingers
Like grains of sand
Through
An
Hourglass.