I can feel it pulling at me from a far away place. Have I slammed and bolted a door that has now splintered in the efforts of the contained to be granted its escape? I thought it forever gone, this long ago remembered stranger. Even as I greet it, place a cup before it, I can feel no warm stirrings within my breast. There is an echo. As if the stranger standing before has placed their lips upon me and I was surprised to find them chilled, leaving behind a print as they are removed from my person.

It's hands are blue with the bite of the winter wind. I feel even before I begin that my efforts to warm it is futile. I want to be filled like I always was with its presence. I want to be consumed and yet I feel like a woman who has grieved only to find the one who died to be alive. Not relief. I feel empty. To look upon its face and see the shadows that lie there and know that I once caressed that cheek moves nothing in me. Its is more faded then memory, less substantial then fog. I cannot hold it,nor see it even, and yet, I know its sits upon my heart waiting. Its is more kin to expectation then a willful acting.

Hollow.

I stare at a shell and know what once filled it and yet no amount of glaring can fill it once more.

Can a greying, empty, shell feel its hollowness? Can it know with its mind what it once was but no longer is without feeling with its heart?

I think it so and yet there is no conviction to this.

Even such ponderings are hollow. Are they not?

This is a statement to my life. A hollowness that fills me.

What have I become?

Nena