My body feels faded today.  So faded, and hollow.  I don’t think that it has changed, but it feels like it has been made of layers of clay.  Each dried, but not fired, and brittle.  Each built on the last, and each a shell around the frame.  Each piece makes a shape around the core of me, and each is dusty and dry.  Clay like a chrysalis around a caterpillar, but brittle and dead.

 I woke this way, but it has been building for days.  Each layer seems like every drop was spent.  Every cell dried out into the room around me, and given over to the hospital i am in.  And looking around through my eyes, i can almost feel the chips of dust come off and fall around my face.  Even this slight movement, my eyes alone, cause bits to fall away.  

  It seems like the dry started within, something inside of my heart welled into the space around it and built up.  I keep trying to think of how to describe how it feels.  I am stuck on clay.  Stuck with this idea of shells of layers, and dust.  I picture a clay soldier frozen in place, guarding a door.  Then someone comes up and paints this arching layer of clay over the top of the soldiers sides and face. Mimicking the person under the clay.  Not obscuring the figure, but instead adding this layer of boundry space around it.  Then the figure was left in the sun, baked in the desert for days on end.  The wind eroding the clay, and pulling it away even as it fills in the cracks with dust.  

 Then another layer over that, and another.  Eventually you can see the figure underneath, and know it was once the soldier at the door.  But a soldier lost into time.  Left in the world for days and months and years on end.  Whittled away from the core, and left with pieces falling and cascading away.  Through all that, the heavy feeling of dryness and age.  Dust and stillness.  A heavy load to pull at the shoulders and frame, and the face within peering out.

 This isn’t the best way to describe the way my body feels today.  Under this sheet, i know i haven’t changed.  I haven’t moved or gotten larger or smaller.  I have never felt so happy that I can’t see what is under this sheet i am benieth.  I am happy to be hidden from the thing in my mind.  The way my mind feels my body has turned.  

 The funny thing is that even in this, in this dust and in this clay mounded and eroded by the wind, I see trails.  I see them in the crests of dried clay arching down my arms.  I see them in the windscale valleys that are pouring down my cheeks.  I can see them in the mounds of clay and dirt at my feet, in the way my legs are bowed and almost built into one.  I almost feel like i am one of the trails.  One of my own trails, leading somewhere else.