You called me City Girl, and I laughed

I’ve never pretended to be a citizen of this city, to belong on concrete veins, rattling along with smog filled lungs. I’m sure that if you cut me open, you would find instead sand and seawater, that my organs are made of kelp, and my eyes are the product of storms ripping at the headlands. Maybe, if you look close enough, you’ll see the sea foam in my laughter or the currents in my tears. On good days, I’m translucent, my depths revealed by the sun hitting my skin. On the bad, I am turned and locked, rioting turbulence that is dangerous to touch. Maybe you would see that I’m a treasure vault, with troves of gems, but they don’t sparkle, they are black and white, and I only know how to spill them violently.

Is it enough that I am me?

Can you love that?

Sometimes when I’m alone, when no one is around and the only sound are these whispers in my soul, I’ll extinguish the lights, put flame to candlewick and dress up as though I’m beautiful. In the shadows of the flames, I’ll dance, open my palms to the ceiling-capped heavens and laugh. Sometimes I’ll feel better. Sometimes, after the high has worn away and the smile has crept from my chest, I’ll find myself lonelier than before and the homesickness will rattle the chamber of my heart. Arrhythmia isn’t strange to me when I’ve never known a normal rhythm.

My eyes don’t stay closed well. My feet don’t know how to stay put. My hands don’t know how not to keep busy, and you wonder why I’m a chest full of shipwrecks. I’ve stopped wearing a watch that works in an attempt to forget all the time wedged between moments I wish I could forget, but time is grains of sand molded beneath my feet.

I loved someone once, and there are moments where I still do. Moments laying wrapped in his arms where the world fades and galaxies cease to exist. But then I try to breathe and find my lungs don’t expand, and I love the sound of thunder, but thunder means lightening and a heart can only take so much electricity before it fails.

Please, don’t blame me for the currents formed beneath southern winds. North has only ever been my hiding place. And I’m not saying upwellings won’t happen, they will. But right now summer is a plague of smothering hands and eyes that think these tides are tame. My blood is a waiting rapture, a riptide that will not hesitate to strike you when you’re not looking. Be warned, you want receive another.