salted caramel cookies

    Salted caramel cookies in the oven. The smell of sweet baking fills every room of the house on a dreamy cloud of deliciousness, but my troubled head is a shield that blocks everything in the environment but my problems. Baking is not helping, neither are the hands massaging my shoulders. Laying my head on the table only assures the existence of a comically-large-weight pushing down on my whole body, ready to smash my soul into a pool of tar and acerbity at the first sign. Nothing helps in moments like this, but there is a necessity of snapping out of it so that the worst doesn’t happen.

   “Come on, sweetheart,” she says on a soft tone, “tell me what’s troubling you.”
   I don’t say anything, and won’t say anything for the rest of the night.
   “Are you sure you don’t want a cookie? They’re really good.”
   Head on the table, my dry nose feels like it’s about to bleed.
   “Want me to put the therapist cloak on?”
   She knows I don’t.
   “I know you don’t, I’m just joking. But what else can we do tonight? Any ideas?”

   Fogged mind. Absent-minded circus-ridiculousness as a dark sky on my once beautiful sky. Black and grey dragons fly around in their almighty circles, clapping their almighty wings, and you can’t hear a tone of their clashing thunders in this deaf world. Her voice as mere longinquus stars that die before I can take notice of their existence.

   “Come with me”, she says, picking me up and carrying my carcass to the living room sofa. “Let’s make your death-bed more comfortable.”
   Taking a last look at her work, breathing hard, she goes back to the kitchen to get the snacks.
   “Hope you like horror movies, it’s the only thing I found on your shelves,” she says, letting out a good laughter, a small little sun to shine life into the desolate land of my state of mind. 

   And the coziness of the blanket, and the softness of the pillow on her lap, and the love in the gentle strokes on my head, clear, slowly but surely, my grey sky. I don’t know what I’d do without her. And with the little muscle movement I’m able to make, I whisper with no voice, “you wouldn’t believe how many nights I ain’t died for you”.