gaze

Your eyes, they teem with burdens. Burdens unspeakable, heaped beneath layer upon layer of densely-packed, coarse hues and gradients. These stacked and shaded gradients, you keep sealed tightly at the seams, just so there's no room for poking holes and crushing air bubbles. Perhaps I'll never know how it is that you bear the sweat and ache of burden, how you muster the courage to liberate others before self. Jaded to the feeling, your affliction becomes familiar. Self-neutralizing, maybe even numbing.

I've hoped you're alright and not horribly disappointed, carrying all that by yourself, with but a scanty pool of souls in the world to stand alongside you. Upon the raw flesh of one back, lays the weight of the whole world.