There’s a crack in the ceiling, just like there is a crack in my brain.

And when I stare long enough, I see it growing.

First, a deepening chasm of what hides between the neurons that are shriveling, and those that list toward the light of the sun.

Phototropism of dreams and nightmares. Mostly nightmares.

And then, I watch it spread. Radiating out in spiderweb-like projections that I imagine an epidemiological map to look like when a deadly virus sets out to destroy the world.

Tendrils of disease and sinkholes of hope.

I’m sorry to tell yous, and lymph nodes swollen with, “when will this be over?”

Because we know when it will be over, but that’s not a good enough answer, so we keep searching.

Rusty, razor edge of reality, and twister tumbled carnage from the inside because it’s a oneway road and the body doesn’t expect to be destroyed from the inside out, which also means, it wasn’t ready for destruction from the outside in, like it usually is.

Because it was trying to fix a mistake.

A break in the code.

A flaw in the design.

And the vulnerability of the unknown strikes fear into your chest, up into your throat, so that you forget how to make sound.

How to form words that are falling into the crack, echoing as they tumble down into a place that will never be reached again.

And the fear scatters out into the extremities so that you can’t reach out to grab the tree trunk for stability.

It enters the heart, so you don’t quite know what it means to be loved. Or to love.

It spins around in your lungs, like a bizarre heavy duty cycle on the washing machine,

and it pulls apart the hemispheres of your brain, another crack, another fissure, another error on a vending machine saying try again later.

Another shriveled, liquid nitrogen frozen flower before your physics professor pitches it into the wall where it will shatter.

Pieces that superglue will never hold together again.

Dust of the promise destroyed, dust of the once living.

I once watched, frozen in place, as an entire door made of tempered glass broke, forming tiny, dull, square-like pieces.

The sound of ice on the top of a pond creaking as a bird hops across it.

The sound of the rope snapping as you swing, released from the apex of the arc, the trajectory of a paper airplane before it spirals downward to meet its fate.

The voice that the water vapor makes as it transforms into frost on the windshield of the car.

I sometimes wonder if my brain is like tempered glass?

Is it better to be fragmented into so many tiny, dull pieces when the dullness is a deep ache instead of a stone skipped across the water.

Or the whooshing of your rapid heartbeat in your ear instead of the smooth edges of sea glass, deposited as the tide goes out.

Instead of the piece of worn driftwood, returning to land in the hands of a beachcomber, a different version than before so as to better remember its life journey.

What is a journey without a transformation, and what is a transformation without the journey to get there?

And how much longer will the journey be?

Because when I stare long enough, I see it growing, the crack in my brain.