Sadness

Sadness had always been an active resident in the places I had lived.
It swelled and breathed and scented the breeze like the dying petals of spring,
floating through open windowpanes and settling like dust on the empty shelves.
Sometimes it just appeared without visible entry like the cobwebs that roost in those corners you had thought so clean just a day ago. Or it unraveled in the morning dew and graced the cold spring skies, scattered like hundreds of wandering stars only visible in the light of a window.

It would melt into my morning tea, cooling the little tornadoes of cream and sugar that spun around my spoon and it would pass behind my pupils as I stood before the bathroom mirror.
I could hear it at night like an insect, clicking across my skull, etching tallies in the walls like a prisoner counting the days without the sun.
Sadness swelled and breathed and surrounded me until I was certain that it was simply a part of my being; the part as close to myself as my skin and my bones or the shadow around my back.
And perhaps that is all that sadness does;
for some it passes by
and for others it just sticks.