“She was so tired most of the time she did not even pretend to feel anything.” - Joyce Carol Oates

He told me I’m supposed to be a ray of sunlight, but the only time I see the sunshine is when it rises, passing over my windshield and reflecting across my rearview mirror. I watch my life disappear behind me, dusty roads from a town I no longer know growing hazy in the distance behind ripples of heat.

Ingrid Michaelson plays a bit too loud on my stereo, making me feel all of the things, but mostly the sadness, I tried to encapsulate the other night.You said I was too much for your fragile heart to handle, somehow the words escaping from a stranger’s mouth, and not from the man I share a bed with every night, hanging out in the open between us, heavy. 

Between sips of coffee, I decide that perhaps it’s better that I just feel nothing at all, if only to keep my own heart from shattering like glass.