"the empty bed"

I will wait until they are in bed and then I will go out and I will set the world on fire.

Away from the walls that my hopes are too fat for, I will be the line, the highlighted journey you follow across maps from a bird’s eye view, as I board trains that tunnel and chuckle away into the night. I will run through cities, cities that make me things I’m not, colour me in the same way as dresses and bright shades of lipstick could.
I will find things, some which I looked for and some which I didn’t – places with the uncertain familiarity of the faint orange glow at the end of a cigarette in the dark.
I will find music, I will find laughter and noise and heart. I will find people who belong to it all and we’ll dance, in sweaty, fairy-lit bars that stench of sticky beer and of smoke.
I will walk, I will get lost. I will lose, find, lose, find, and at some point I will learn the way.
My shoes will be muddy, my back will ache. But even then, when my eyes are prickling and through stations I draw closer and closer to what I recognise I won’t have any fear anymore because I’ll have done it, I’ll have been and come back in the blink of an eyelid, in a puff of smoke and I will have won.

When it’s 6am, and I’m oddly enough back between sheets, closing eyes against the uncomfortable pale grey of the early morning sky I’ll still know. And as my worn and achy body goes to sleep, in the bed nobody noticed was vacant, I will for a while believe that I am no insomniac and no depressive but a wanderer.

They’ll never know.