You Always Return

You return on schedule.
Not as memory,
not as desire,
just pattern.

A chemical echo
in the blood.
Predictable.
Measured.
Almost boring.

I don’t pretend to want you anymore.
I don’t dress your hunger up as love.

You are simply
the shortest distance
between silence
and nothing at all.

I take you
the way a tired man
takes cold medicine.
No reverence.
No ritual.

Just habit.

You peel me down to the bare mechanics
of breathing and forgetting.
A temporary erasure.
A clean wound.

Morning will come.
It always does.

I will rebuild.
I always do.

Not because I believe in recovery.
But because the body moves
even when the spirit does not.

And when you return again
and you will 
I won’t call it fate,
or weakness,
or longing.

Only repetition.

A door that never needed to be opened
because it was never closed.