It is ridiculous,

the twisting of my tongue.

I think of you like the moon and stars has been brought down to eyeline-

yet I shift, and quicksilver insults unfurl beneath my enamel cage.

I release a heavy, puffing sigh. It feels like gunpowder to me. You don't even flinch at the residue- starlight and pure- in front of your feet.

You eye me strangely as I bow at the waist and grapple at my knees.

But you don't understand. You are so wonderfully oblivious, so when you ask my problem and I say you, you laugh like it's a joke.

But you don't hear my heart thrumming in my ears. Nor feel my anxiety rattling.

Both heavy hands on the cages around my heart- dark, and trying to expose itself- shaking.

I fight to keep you from my mind, and I spend most of my time like this.

So much so I forget how to spindle my own tales to you- eyes bright and watching.

You asked me, innocent, to describe the difference between your blue eyes and another's.

I wanted to call yours lovely. I wanted to say they'd capsize a dozen men. I don't; I just say they're paler.

Paler? As though they could ever dwindle?

I listen to her sing over my phone,

light my favourite candle,

glance at her when she misses a chord.

I had put my laptop away, but she makes me want to create.

A flame warding my cold soul,

and I listen.

My fingers draft things ii can never tell her, but I feel,

a screen apart, half an hour drive away.

I clench my jaw at the reminder of her smirk,

cheeks flush from the heat of the fire.

I listen to her talk when she messes up,

comment something that makes her laugh.

It makes my face hurt.

I press the pads of my fingers to my cheek,

I feel the dimple there, my father's, the one I share between two brothers, beneath the fatty tissue given by my mother.

I clench my jaw to stop the feeling swarming like hot honey in my chest,

because she will never feel the same for me.

She'll search for what I feel in the face of men, and ill search for her in a million other women.

I hope they replicate blue eyes, and her eye roll. They won't. But I hope.

I wiped my own tears. I force fed my twisted belly. Soothed my own nightmares.

And yet, I message my trauma that I'm there if she needs me.

I swallow against a thick throat. I wonder if this makes me better than her- for caring.

But she did not care as I was taken advantage of in my sleep.

She went outside for a smoke, so she didn't have to hear it. Or deal with it. a

The nicotine stains the purse I brought that day.

I tore it apart with a patient knife.

I remember, as I type a text to a friendship I did not kill, how I care. But she maimed me beyond repair. And while I look the same- I am not.

I berate myself for sending it. She will not care. The same as she didn't when I had spilt blood into my pants, staining them to the point of burning.

I cannot help the warring of my heart. Perhaps that makes me kinder than her. Perhaps it makes me just as sick.

If you saw a shattered plate, you would not glue it.

But here I am- tape, wire, wrap, string and glue all over.

Because I tried to fix something that only drew blood when I picked it up.

And I am horribly empty, despite knowing it would happen.

Perhaps it's exhaustion in my bones, or poison from adhesives steeping from where I'm all wound up.

I keep trying. I am so tired. So sticky and so interweaved with myself that I've lost which limb is meant to go where.

I try, I try, I try. I get jagged edges in my side for thanks.

I wonder if I'll stop purchasing bindings before or after I unbind myself.

Seven years of the same pills.

I feel like I've been sat on a slowly rusting swing,

until I'm flush with cold mulch and the birds are picking at me.

I have been decaying for seven years. I am not sure if that is medical,

or just who I am.

But I am trying to learn.

I cut my doses. I feel it on the fifth day.

I feel the anxiety, as familiar and unknown as a godmother's gift on your birthday.

I bite my lip, and try to ration the hallucinations as just that.

But I drift on the roads when it's dark, and the light burns me in the day.

I force myself to not react- to not do anything I wouldn't with the pills.

But I've never been good at sense, as I was as destructive with them as without.

I shake, and I'm pale, and I wake most mornings drenched in sweat shivering with bile in my mouth. I smile around it all, and force food through clattering teeth to satiate the masses.

I try not to dwell. Try not to even allow a conscious thought to linger, because it will make me sick. I am as dizzy as a drunk with none of the fun. With just the reminder of my condition.

I do not cry about it. I do not ache. I feel so sickly, that I cannot rationalize emotion.

Perhaps that is best. My emotions have never made sense.

Maybe on the eighth year they will.

I must be awake too long-

When I begin to humanize my parents.

Invasion them young; bright eyed and curious.

I cannot hate a child.

Even if they grow into unsure bodies.

It is all of our first try at life. How could I fault them? Bright eyes turned dark with time.

But they gave their spark to my brothers and I. We try not to waste it.

My mouth is bitter. Tongue toeing with carbonation.

My mouth breaks- barely. Lips parting, a sigh like a drop of rain on my heated flesh.

I swallow, when the kid im watching barrels onto me. I wonder if you watch me too-

but I wrap the kid at my hip in a hug, blissfully unaware for a moment.

But I feel you there- on my perifpheri. I hope you like the vision;

me busying around a dozen kids- easily handling them all.

I will always have one on my hip.

I don't know if you're still watching- I hope I have enough time.

To make my case. To be too sweet. But you're gone when I glance back.

I swallow, and double my efforts on the swing, pretending it doesn't bother me.

I wish you saw, long enough to long.

I sit on the old, crumbly brick wall. It is tan, against my pale flesh.

Yet nothing compares to the eyesore of my stark-white sweater.

I am not sure where else to sit. My grandparents grave is but a plate in the grass,

overgrown and overcome with neighbours they''d never met in this cemetery.

It leaves a bitter taste it my mouth. I wish they had been buried with honour- their own plot with as great a headstone as they were. But I was thirteen and twenty respecticaally when my grandpa and grandma died.

I fall asleep in the little cot of a room in their home I'd never venture into before now, with one of my tired uncles beckoning. He asks if it is okay, as a stop before visiting one of my cousins, hut I haven't been in this home in so long- last I was a preteen. I am an adult now. I shut the door with burgeoning pain, my teeth, uneven, buried into my lip to stop the sobs wanting to wretch from my chest.

I had not been in this home since before they bad both passed. It weighs heavily-

over the fair for a plane, or extra baggage I'm sure to bring back with momentos.

That night, among stale sheets and stiff matress springs, I dream.

I dream of a church, perhaps. It is all bathed in dark blue and black. I traverse it with confidence, ignoring the trepidation in my soul as my father leads me soundlessly throughout the Holy place- his soul bright, yellow and pleasant in such a cold place.

I see something on the balcony above where the precession should be. But I don't say a word, as he easily glides through the halls until we end up in a hall, similar to a grand church, or, as my childish mind supplies. from Harry Potter. I cannot make it out. I jam drawn. I do not have time to waver in this place.

It becomes muddled in the darkness. My father's guiding light lost to the shadows.

Yet I know.

This is where I am meant to be.

I stop, near an entryway to a random, empty room. My grandparents don't register me significantly- maybe they don't know how I have aged. Perhaps they see me as a baby still. Perhaps they are preoccupied. I do not register them other than otherworldly. Significant. No matter, I follow my grandmothers beckoning, which I hadn't last I seen her to a sweater she thought smart, and I loathed with hormones displaced.

She leads me to a wall further down the grand hall. I follow: curious, wondering. She tells me somehow, her baby is stuck. I do not remember if it was in her voice- or her accent. Somewhere in my brain, I remember the baby she had lost in her earlier years. Taken by heartless nurses, and discarded in a mass grave by unkind people.

I do not hesitate. I break through the wall. I use a chair that appears- beckon people I was beforehand unaware of to help.They do not. I battle this brick wall myself in a blue haze of my watchful grandmother, bathing me in surety and confidence. The wall breaks, to reveal an old hospital ward. A wary nurse, maybe, and a child in a cot. The cot beams bright blue. I know to burst forward through the bricks tumbling- do not care for the darkness beyond. I scoop the child up- my uncle, sandwiched between three, one of the eldest should he have survived it- and deliver him to my grandmother.

She holds him- in robes that would be used in a baptism, perhaps, as my grandpa crowds behind her with a soft hand and a soft expression so remittent of. my dad now- elderly and fond.

She thanks me for completing her family. There is so much fondness in her gaze. I do not have an urge to ask anything further. Her grin on her second born son, and my grandpa- so priorly joking and ridiculous, is gently observing. I know they ae complete.

And I awake.

Later in my visit, my family tells me how my grandfather had passed when one of my cousins and aunts had found where my uncle would have been buried in an unmarked grave. How she had been content to know it, before she passed.

I wonder, if I had helped her. My grandmother.

This dream, in truth, outside a story tale, had been many months prior. My family hated to hear it when I told it. But when I visited my grandparents grave, I wondered about th4 great unknown. If even in my own mind, I had given them comfort. I hadn't been upset that night- hadn't beckoned them. But they were there. And this dream shall linger in my bones, so long as their blood runs.

I know I am good. After all, bad people do not tell people they are bad to the extremity I have unless they are not trying to convince themselves of it.

I believed it for years. I think, nearly twenty-three, that I am not so horrible.

I am older, now. Cannot hate my teenage self for suriving. Do not discount her actions, because it was all she had. A lashing tongue- barbed with harm, and lingering with longing. Some were drawn. Some were not. Some loathe me. Some accept all I had to give.

But I am not a teen anymore. I have had years to hate myself. Years to try to be anyone but myself.

Yet, I persist.

I have done bad things- but that does not make me bad.

My heart bleeds for things I've said a decade ago. I make amends when I can. Some do not want to bathe in my copper tears, others abate my crimson care for a dubious understanding.

But I still bleed like they never anointed me. My blood spurts, uneven from a faucet unforgiven and unnoticed especially, until I am weak and laying in a lukewarm puddle of my own pain.

I hope the blood will soak to my skin. So all will know my guilty, and apology. But that is the same seeking as bleeding it raw, is it not?

I've done enough damage. So I do not harm myself. I better myself in the name of those I harmed.

And yet, I drink, and drink, until those who hurt me numb.