thoughts in winter

hmm, not so sure about this one. i like a couple of the lines though, so hey, might as well share it with you folks.
enjoy.

You clink your can against my mug in a cheering motion, as I look at you slightly sceptically. I’m aiming for the thirty six year old in a black dress with pearls, the kind of look that makes me look worldly wise and all knowing.
‘I’m trying to escape life,’ you laugh.
And I laugh back, but I feel like I am semi mocking. I don’t think you can escape it.

It didn’t bother me at first. I arrived in the city from the mountains, and in the beginning, in the beginning, the town seemed an escape. It didn’t take long though. It was the grey that did it. It seemed to be entrenched in the very sky. As you breathed in the air, you felt the grey seeping into you skin.
‘That’s how it happens,’ I would think, looking at the colourlessness of the faces looking through me. ‘You breathe in this air, and it turns into your very pores.’ It was terrifying to me. Each night in front of the mirror, I’d look carefully, obsessively, at the reflection that faced me, searching for the starting points of that deathly greyness.
Up in the mountains, there you can breathe.
The city leaves me feeling bruised. I’m not strong enough for this place, I think. It is too big for me.
But I didn’t mind it at first, that thought plays on my head, like a drumbeat. I didn’t mind I didn’t mind. Why does it bother me now, then?

I remember you holding my head in your hands and telling me I was beautiful, and for the first time I believed the words, for the first time they were real to me. And now, now when your hands are gone and you no longer say it, I look in the mirror to see me no longer beautiful, no longer believable. I lie on the bed and close my eyes and I think, at least I can sleep. I sleep like I’m dead.

I pour myself a glass of wine to try and warm my body up. If I’m warm maybe I’ll hurt less. Everything seems hard these days. I walk through the city and I can’t concentrate on my feet, I can’t concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other because it is too hard. So I decide to sit in here and drink a glass of wine. It is easier than going on to the street and having to face the faces of the people who surround me, and who look at me funny when I forget that I’m crying again, because crying is such a natural state for my face nowadays that I don’t see the tears anymore.

Surely that ain’t right.

I try and think back as to what it was like when I first arrived in the city. I moved into this flat and tried to accustom myself to the cold.
The cold here, it is different. Up in the hills, I know it is colder. But there, it is a frostiness that freshens you, when you breathe in the air it hits your lungs like a canon, filling you up with dizziness like when you have that hit of tobacco after you haven’t smoked for a long time. It brings goose pimples on your skin as you bury your nose in the wool around your neck and giggle at the headiness that the air forces into your head.
But in the city, as I huddle around the source of heat in my room, it is the dampness that seeps into my bones and gets under my skin. My hair feels like it is never dry. After one too many glasses of wine a warmth plays around my chest as my feet try and wriggle to warm themselves up a bit. I start to wonder that if I stare hard at the walls, if I look carefully enough, then I’ll be able to see the patches growing on the walls; see the yellow turning darker as the wetness in the air turns the patterned wallpaper more and more hideous.
It didn’t bother me at first. I didn’t mind.
I light another cigarette, hoping the illusion of fire at the end of my hands will warm them up.
All I can think is
My body is being torn apart and I can’t stop it anymore. They take with all their demands and I want to push it away, but I’m not strong enough. Like in a dream I push my hand forward to hit back, and it falls listlessly in a terrifying slow motion. So I don’t fight back anymore and I give myself up to what I hope you promise me. My hair starts to fall into your fingers and I give it to you freely, before you tie it around my throat and tell me you don’t want it. On my knees my head pulls up and something someone tries to take something from the blankness of my face to keep for themselves, and I give it up gladly, hoping you’ll find out and wish you had it too.
Fingers touch and grab and my body lies open to anyone who thinks they can take from it, and all I want is you, even if you means tearing me to pieces because if you do it, at least it saves me from the other fingers.