All your life you have been shrinking, if not outside than in.

You cling to a purpose, desperately—your nails break and your fingers begin to bleed from your tight grasp.

“Why am I like this?” you ask, not for the first time. Your own desperate voice resounds in the chamber, sinks down into an endless void.
You’ll never receive an answer.

You’ve been trapped here your whole life.
This flesh suit you call a prison, others call a body, a home. Something that is supposed to be so innately yours, something you were born into, expected to grow, take care of. Something you loathe.

This home is something suffocating, something you are all too aware of.
You’re drowning.
You are drowning in it, suffocating on this thing you cannot even name.
You cannot escape.
You run from this thing that you are becoming, this thing that you are trapped in.

“Please, God, let me out,” you beg.
Just one breath of air, you plead, and you can return to your cage.

It’s a cloak you can hide under, one you find solace in, even after all this time.

You could live your entire life under it- a pillar of your lonely crusade into oblivion.

“Is that really a life?” They might ask. You don’t know. Definitions are a subjective and fickle thing, a mess of arbitrary jargon designed to help us understand. Often, they work to the contrary.

If the past is any baseline, they all lie through their teeth. Is life nothing more than an infected wound, slowly killing you from the inside as you desperately try to patch it? Something perpetually healing and never ‘healed’.

It begs for a resource it is not allowed. You can feel it twisting, turning inside of you like a voracious beast, one you thought you had conquered long ago, arisen from the dead.

“It’s your own fault,” someone whispers to you. You are alone in your room.

You turn on the lights to feel less alone, your only company the voiceless dancing entity within the small bulb. A presence not really there, yet comforting nonetheless.

“Why did you do that?” something else will ask. Something deep within the boundaries of your mind, though it is not you. It’s not you, yet it becomes a part of you more and more each day, growing like a malignancy, a wronged adversary with a penchant for revenge.

It haunts you, clings to your bowels, takes your guts in its hands, and squeezes. It permeates though the entirety of your body—it seeps into your blood, it infects your brain. Simultaneously. It’s everywhere. It’s nowhere.

Is it really just you?

It can’t be. It can’t be you, because that line of reasoning doesn’t make sense. Why would you do this? Why would you do this to yourself? Later, they’ll ask you the same thing. There is no answer you can give them that will satiate their curiosity.

You don’t even know yourself.

a gasp of lavender
reaches the parts of me that belong to you
smoke that twists, twirls, transforms
a weapon fleeting but lethal
will it glow inside like it did before
will it emulate your touch
sacrilegious
the false wisps of a former life
rush under my skin
into my blood
it’s not enough
never enough
not you

beauty not created but transferred
your voice flows into the brush
a fluid magic
the shades of your wings reflect it
transferred for me, mine
I’d take any small piece
a fraction of you
to feel it’s warmth emanating
the surface a gentle thing
sparing nothing
every particle I crave

how long can you go on fracturing yourself
splitting your soul into pieces
hiding them in the woodwork of your mind
before the pieces are found?
how long can you live
knowing you’ll never be whole
only a part
how long can you survive in the dark?

mon menton repose dans mes mains, lourd
heures passées à lire, mes paupières tachées pâle rose
la seule évasion de la prison de mon esprit