I'm writing out a bill for the last 25 years of therapy.
Your IOU fell through
And I pretended I didn't keep track.
I abandoned my post and thought
"Thatll do it."
If I put a province between us
We could start over and make up
Our own separate stories about
My childhood.

We could forget about the late nights of talking you off the ledge of all those buildings you built yourself.
Each one closer to the clouds.
You would look at me, tears in your eyes, saying things like
"I love you" and
"Goodbye" in the same sentence.
And I didn't understand how those words could be so close together,
Doesn't one negate the other?
If you leave, was there ever any love?

I'd watch you love these other women who would never be my mother,
And they would eat up every night with hours of phone conversations behind your closed bedroom door.
You'd come to me in love,
Proposals being imagined in your head,
All this beauty after so many painful days of you breaking your heart over and over.

Within weeks you'd be back with me, and we would book another appointment.
I'd sit across from you,
Digesting every word
Making notes for my future loves
So I would know what to do.

Love and leave.
Love and leave.

My skin is dead weight,
Keeping the person inside of me so still.
My tongue, glued to the bottom of my mouth so all I can do is make noise and it means nothing to anyone.
I won't move a muscle
Because it told me if I ever did
It'd come back and **** my family.
And even though they'll never know,
I still pretend they say thankyou everyday.

Whoever writes my obituary is going to say such lovely things.

And no one will ever know what my trauma did to them, or to me.

My bed is where I let myself drown a bit
It's where I let myself be soft
Folding my legs in like the corner of the sheets
And letting you get close
But never to my face.
You can get in even closer if you touch my skin the way I tell you to
And let me perform the way I've been taught to
So that after every show you can clap for me
Tuck my hair behind my ears
Kiss my eyelashes
And tell me you've never felt the inside of someone the way you feel mine.
It's existing and it could almost be called life.
The trail of colors and feelings you trace along my spine and my hips so that I can always look in the mirror and remember every single thing that ever created this body.

You love this body.
You love it so well that you think it loves you too.

I want to catch my daydreams as they try and flee, and tie them around my wrists so I can carry them with me.

I will tie them with the pink thread from the dress you loved to watch me twirl in after church, in the basement.
It will be a relief to watch the wind hold those memories rather than holding them in that part of my brain we don't talk about.
It will look pretty, and light.
Maybe I will feel pretty, and light.

Either way these things I see running through my head are stuck with me as long as I keep the threat tied tight,
I will look past that pink string and into the thought of living a life where I am the bird on my arm and the child inside me.

We fly together and we are free.

Somehow you have managed to grow into this body that is made up of all of these small things that fit together in the most distracting way. When you sit close to me I can feel the static from your skin and I always brace myself for the shock, but for some reason you just absorb it or something and I'm left with my shoulders tense and this weird, phantom pain in whatever spot you were closest to. Sometimes when I think about you I get this random heartbeat that comes from a spot inside me that really shouldn't have a heartbeat. It's like you scrambled me inside and out and head to toe, but it still totally works and somehow my organs keep me alive like they haven't moved from their original spot. Sometimes I just can't wrap my head around how you feel so light and it's so constant that my brain just goes into this overmedicated kind of fog and I have to blame it on some conspiracy theory like, this is the Truman Show and I've just been conditioned since birth to end up here, that it's just a script. Love can be so easily created and that means I never have to lose this.

I wonder if you ever feel this about me.

I think I could be this for you too, you know. I am really likeable I think and I'm not scared to jump off the cliff if that's what comes next.

I'll meet you at the bottom.

I often take the time to write out something that feels like the old me
Who is sad and kind of cracked.
The one who made the wrong decisions because that's what she knew to do.
Because feeling sad is what I grew with most of my life.
Feeling a little hollow was supposed to be permanent and sometimes
When I look at how my life is so warm now, and every part of me that used to be empty is now filled with flowers and roots and so much green.
It's nice to breathe in a little of the cold I used to feel day after day.
Maybe I still do it to know that if
All of this falls apart like I often expect it to,
I could go back there and it would be as if nothing happened.

I'm the easiest to read,
My eyes hide nothing.
You can look through each of my ramblings in the form of a poem
And you'll always come to the same conclusion.
I am nothing but well carved out puzzle pieces of the past, filled with bodies and shattered hearts, faked *******, memories of hands, pictures of how to let go and finding a strangers strand of hair wrapped around my fingers and tucked into my clothes.
So I never forget.

I think about it all the time.
What is it like to see me through someone else's mouth?
Do you ever smell something that brings an image of me to the front of your mind,
And it takes you days to shake it off?
Do I feel familiar, ever?
Sometimes it's nice to think about it like that and feel sure of your ability to connect with people.
Your intuition is strong.
You know when the feelings are there and when they aren't.
Also so,
So,
Good at following someone else's lead.
I'm the prettiest mirror
I always smell soft
And when you say "Lets"
I say "Yes".