August Rush

‘August’, I plead, watching the days slip through my frost-bitten fingers, cold and unfeeling, stealing me of my warmth, ‘Don’t go’.
‘Don’t rush’, I beg, in a powerless attempt to protect my heart beneath her heels, ‘Keep it safe’.
August laughs, bitter and derisive.
‘Time’s a bitch. She shows no sympathy for the weak.’
‘I’m not weak’, I oppose, tiredly. ‘I just can’t..don’t want to face it.’
‘Be brave, my child’
Oho! How comforting.
‘I’m scared. With your departure arrives change.’
‘The only thing permanent is change.’
How fucking tranquillizing.
I choose my next words carefully, posing for callous.
‘When you leave, I’ll be forced to fight loss and heartbreak and impending exams and renewed memories and tears and growing older. Stay. Please?’
I’m a bad poser.
August can’t stop moving.
I feel sick.
I expected sun with a touch of dead leaf and inner peace.
Hah.
‘I can’t’, she says, frustration etched into her laugh lines.
‘Why not’? I push sulkily, the winds of change forcing me forward with each breath I take.
‘It doesn’t work like that. Life, remember?’
‘Life’s a bitch too’? I press, eagerly almost, waiting for the raw sweet taste of gossip to melt in my mouth.
August smirks, ‘You make it, you tell me’.
I’m starting to get jittery. Life keeps forgetting to let me live. I don’t like it very much.
‘She’s going away---my interpreter, my weakness, my strength, my glimpse of what’s real. Freeze, for me?'

August is starting to fade.
Bitch.
‘I won’t be able to survive without her.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please stay?’
Stay
Stay
Stay
Don’t go.
Stay bitch.
No.
I grab what’s closest to me. Mirror Mirror on the Wall..
Fragments of broken glass,

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
Blood, heat and the smell of burnt leaves

Bye-bye August
Come again.

Self Defense, I swear.