Old poem that isn’t good

There is a clock on your wall. It counts minutes, seconds. Hours. A day is 12 hours. If you do not sleep it is 24.  You can count the minutes as they turn into seconds and pretend it means something, pretend that your hold will stay firm.

If you close your eyes, you are twelve. It is cold, the wind nips at your ears. The cold does not yet bother you. It is comfortable, it loosens whatever you have lodged in your chest, suffocating. You cannot feel your body.  Crawling. The cold is freedom. It is certainly better than the hot and stuffy and rot. The heat makes fruit flies line your kitchen and all you can smell is something awful and moldy.  The heat is made worse by the blankets lining the walls, by the smell of dread radiating from the basement the adults told you not to go into. By the scent of hose water that still sticks to your skin. By the girl laying on the bed. 

When it is hot, you sleep on the couch. When it is hot, you try not to think too hard.

You like the cold. 

You are sitting in your old elementary school playground after hours. You do not know this will be the last year you will ever see it. You sit with a ghost. You do not know it is the last time you will ever see him. 

There is something you lost, in that moment. A type of heat that will stick to your bones. When you leave the heat, the crawling and the rot, you can still feel it clinging to you at night, calling to you in a way that only youth would. That only fear would.  A fire cannot make itself out of nothing. What does that make you?