There is something audible in the silence of a bathroom
when the walls are bland beige washed orange by the artificial light.
A bug sits on the wall and something tells me to get rid of it,
                         good riddance
but I can’t gather the courage to do it.

There is a hole in my chest where my heart should be. I could say my heart is light but I can’t feel its weight in my ribcage and I can't hear the beating and I can’t even feel the blood it should be pumping through my body but I’m still alive and that’s the only confirmation I get that
  my
   heart
    is
     still
      there.

Everything is quiet in this bland orange bathroom, and the bug still sits on the wall.

I climb on a counter.

Face to face with this bug, I see its antennae wiggling back and forth.
There is life inside of it.
I can’t squash it.

                 The light bulbs washing the bathroom orange haven’t
                                 been dusted since we moved in.

I climb off the counter and place the ball of toilet paper down.
The bug is alive and by some miracle,
so
  am
   I.

My heart remains somewhere inside my chest,
numbed.

This room is silent too. Nothing but the white noise of the ceiling fan and the furious tapping of the keys on the keyboard composing my mess of a mind into a mess of a poem.

Maybe now it is as quiet inside my head as it is in these rooms.

Maybe now I can sleep.

The bug remains on the ceiling.

Amelia wore a yellow slicker raincoat,
rain or shine, Every day without fail
And her smile was almost as bright as that
But not quite.

Amelia took off the raincoat in the seventh grade, when
a boy said she looked like a duckling,
"the ugly duckling". They laughed, but her?
Not quite.

Tenth grade rolls around. The raincoat is
collecting dust in the very back of a closet filled to the brim
with clothes no one could say were an ugly duckling's feathers.
First day of school, and it begins to rain. Pour, even.
But not quite.

Amelia is in a rush. She grabs the first raincoat she sees,
the ugly duckling yellow slicker. She
begins to cry, and her tears are almost
blending in with the rain.
But not quite.

with no other choice, she wears her feathers.
she expects laughter, and pointed fingers
but she is met with the same smiles as
she always was.
"Cute raincoat, Amelia!"
And she begins to smile, almost as wide as she did
when she was an innocent duckling.
But not quite.

For Amelia, who found her wings
in an old yellow slicker raincoat,
smiled wider.