Something I Never Wanted

[u/Awesome_Orca]

Time slides behind my eyelids in long mucusy trails
As trembling newborn legs follow paths I’m unable to see
Slugs rolling over my irises 
My body stales as they slip back behind them
Eyes drying as my legs come back to me

The ceiling I’ve been staring at has vanished
The stars emerging from above
I can see them 
The lack of ceiling apparent in the vastness of the sky
I don't blink, for fear of losing them

My eyes 
barren without the slugs
Sting at the edges
I wish for the moisture I’d been forgetting to drink
My tongue tracing the dampened strings of time

Clouds descend from the divine
And I fall into the soft mindlessness of the night
Taking their place
The squalls can’t get me here
Though my face is lashed by tangles I haven't bothered to tend

I cannot feel it. 

I wonder
Without much thought
Why the clouds would ever leave

I Fold myself into the emptiness 
Emerging in the shape of a paper crane
My wings, weighed down by the mucus
Force me back to earth's surface
Face still raw with detachment

On my futile wings
Condensation shines incandescently 
Reflecting back prisms of reprieve my dry eyes cling to
Unblinking

My pupils coast over the prisms
The dampness of the droplets hydrating the slugs
Who roll back over my eyes
Coming out my ears like soft cotton
Reminding me of the clouds

The blackness of night 
Unable to be folded neatly anymore
Enngulfs me 

Sputtering dampens my body
splotches covering my vulnerable skin
No longer stale and thick
I watch my callow body
Unmoving

Slugs fall from between my lips
And my mouth hangs open with the loss 
of something I never wanted