Still, I am here

You sit a few feet away, but looking in your direction I feel as though I’m standing on the shore squinting at a ship reduced to a tiny dot far from the coast. I do not belong. I am tolerated, not welcome. What was once familiar is utterly foreign and repulsive. The smell, the sounds, the suffocating atmosphere, all the same, as if frozen in time. I want so badly to tell you to run, to get as far…