I stand in a puddle of water
Liquid pooled around my ankles
Dripping from my eyes so slow I didn’t notice them at first
But when they become apparent, foreign fingers brushed them away
And I disregard the wetness to pull back the hands

Who do these hands belong to?

The puddle becomes a pool
I stand in the shallows and wiggle my toes
My fingers have grown pruney from where my fingers dip in the water
Blisters have settled on my soles and children splash at my face
Droplets trail to my collarbone and I blink away water or tears and wonder
Ears listening to unrecognizable laughter

Whose children are these?

The water sits level at my mouth
I should feel weightless but my clothes drag me down
The pool has become a lake and I stand in it shivering
Perched on my toes there is a precarious balance for air
The tears don’t stop and the water keeps rising
My sobs echo across the surface
Murky figures wave at me from the shore and smile like they know me

Who am I?

They say a river never forgets
That it knows its way back to the ocean
But my river swirls around my head and drips out my ears
The lake forms a loch of memories that can be touched
But never held

A lake is where memories go to be forgotten

I drown in a Lethe that pours from my eyes, from my mind
And I sink to forget and be forgotten

I had always imagined your heart to be tiny,
Small like a hummingbird's.

Not because you were incapable of love,
But because you had the capacity for so much of it.

It fluttered at the briefest of glances
And jumped at the slightest of touches.

So fast did your heart beat that I had often mistaken you for dead
When I would wrap my hands around your throat.

You ran and you called and you pleaded
But no one could hear your little heart.

Even as it stuttered frantically
Against your rib cage, brittle as paper.

No one wants to love a quiet heart.

And so I took it and strung it on a chain of gold
So it could sit silently atop my own heart.