Rose blush, tinted baby rouge underneath her skin. I thought I saw her smile, but it was only her wincing in pain.

I wake up in the morning questioning the infinite cracks on my bedroom ceiling. There is a crack up there for each time you leave. I ask them if they know the reasons as to why I feel undone. The foundation of the room searches for an answer in its faults only to find that behind the paint lies nothing but rotting wood. I feel naked. A resting foreigner on the bed that I made as I lay fully clothed in a nightgown I can feel settling into my skin. I feel ill. ***** settles on my tongue the same way spit does when your mouth waters for something you long for. Some mornings my body becomes a corset that relies on you to tie the knots and by the afternoon I find myself stranded in tangled knots of indented flesh and exhaustion.

I was told my wings would sprout at the right time, when I needed them the most. I keep leaping off balconies and rooftops, hoping that they will spring out of my spine. I have broken bones hoping, but once fractures heal I jump again. Disappointment never felt this good.

His old shoes were always on in bed, but he left his mind outside the bedroom door. He told me, "There is no need for it where I am planning to go." I want to know where he travels to when those eyelids rest. I imagine it a place where it snows in the summer. A woodland area where leaves fall upwards toward the sky and collect on the clouds.

You can be the river flowing down my skin,
but how do I begin to tread waters that I have once drowned in before?
You make sinking feel like a dance with the sea.
Waves do not always come before the breakdown,
but somewhere there is a storm
and my heart is always sighing at me.
Puddles,
puddles of ash.
Dear love, I am burning on the inside,
and I have grown so used to the sting.
You can be the river flowing down my skin.
You can be the river flowing down my skin.

My heart cracked a little on the inside.
My ribcage caved from smooth words that slipped down my throat
like angel nectar.
On the inside a girl stands there with clairvoyant eyes and a hushed tongue,
but at the center there is a hollowness that remains.
The small things in my life slip through my fingertips so easily.
I cannot catch them.
Catch them.
or
Catch up.
Catch up to the feelings that I leave on the doorstep of my eyelids.
Since then I try to fill the cracks,
the gaps,
the spaces that yearn to feel the fullness I felt
when I was a ripened fruit ready to burst into maggots
and sweetened sap.