when you listen to birds sing,
and you witness the fragility of every movement
they make, maybe then you can see her
because she walks exactly like birds sing,
so delicately-
almost like she's afraid
to break something when in reality,
she's so easy to break because she was the twig
that you so easily snap time and time
again and her body is made up of so many angles
that she could be a mathematical equation,
she wishes every night that she can become a
mathematical equation because maybe then
her problems can be easy to solve,
maybe if she found x,
she could also find herself
because she had lost who she was that one night
where her clothes hung her too loosely and the
mirror made her out to be some sort of monster,
and for a second when she first looked at the mirror,
she was scared of herself
so she hid between little white lies and masterly crafted
excuses, she carved the word pretty in her head and it repeated
itself constantly in her mind like a mantra because
some small part of her believed that maybe if she
repeated it enough, she could stop being so ugly
and start being beautiful
//
maybe then she could find out how to stop being
as frail as the same twigs you so easily break without noticing
//
when you hear the birds sing, and you snap the twigs
that you found on the street, that is the only moment
when you can truly see her, a broken shard of glass as
thin as ever-melting ice and as breakable as the leaves that
surround twigs
(h.l.)