If I Pull The Dagger Out

My skin prickles with heat,

Dropping doves on laundry lines

My heart leaps hard against my ribs,

Shelving sonograms in my mind,

Oh dear. I am in love.

On friendship:

When I spend time with you all, I feel a ball of light pool in my weary palms.

The weight in my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, releases like smoke out of my lungs.

I can breathe again, I can laugh again.

I take the light home with me, and it isn’t so dark there anymore.

I am fickle with happiness. They say you don’t know a good memory is happening until it ends, but I do. I’m acutely aware of how precious the good times are—pair that with the odd feeling I get of being watched by my future self, having dealt with the deaths and tragedies that growing older brings, seeking refuge in the past. I feel anxious knowing it will be over, and that no matter how deeply and fully I cherish the strong legs beneath me, the wind on my face, my parents by my sides, it will end the same. All happinesses are doomed to be memories. And that bitters them for me; when I am at my happiest, and my smile is wide as it is earnest, I still taste the rancor in the back of my throat.

I want to change.

You can.

But I am afraid.

You ought to be.

I can't change.

Yes you can.

My legs are shaking. My feet are stuck in the ground.

Unstick them. Walk. Move. Change. Now!

Now?

Now.

She caressed her lover’s hair like a bird tending her nest; she saw only futures in the black tangles clinging to her fingers.

I never knew nothing could be so heavy as it is now. Air rests in my hands like handlebars on a bike to nowhere. Chain links of silence drill their fingers into my ears, it is all I can hear now. My muscles weary from carrying do not rest now that he is gone. They anticipate the next departure. They cling to routine, clutching, clutching, unable to let go. All they’ve ever known is hanging on, just another day. What is there left for them now but emptiness, slopping down like wet concrete. Frozen in time.

The black beetle lies on its back, stomach burning by the tips of the sun’s low hanging fingers. I flip him over with my broom four times, and he can’t manage to stay upright. It could be the wind knocking him over, or the cracks in man made stone unfamiliar to his nature bound feelers. Or it could be that he just wants to die and I have to let him.

Out of fear of being exposed, I crawl and grovel and claw at the shell of my old self, desperate for a morsel of comfort, of old. I find I’ve done nothing but destroy it’s memory and starve my newest iteration, in a form of betrayal only one as indecisive and stagnancy-drawn as I could pull off.

That is what they don’t understand. They think some external pressure is destroying me but it has always been myself. Only my finger tips know where on my belly is tender and bruised enough to burrow into.

Sometimes when I have a dream, I feel entirely refreshed of my old perspectives. I see everything brand new, as if I’m a different person. What relief. I know now why our minds wander in the fields of the twilight hours. To abandon the stagnant pond misery we wade in and remember possibility, endless as always.