4/3/2016
"The hurt is not enough."
Robert Frost

i lay in a swathe of linen,
not having left the house for days,
not having showered since the 31st
oh, back to my old ways.

sitting up
i read a letter i locked in a box
when i was fourteen.
it was meant to be open when i turned
twenty

a paper grasped in the throes of
sticky fingers,
sticky with isoprophyl
i wished to clean off all the impurities
i remember i showed three times that day and then some

you told me
you know how i feel,
but no one deserves that

you told me that day
you didn't know why you didn't hang up,
didn't know why you were bothering to comfort me
you know i still think about that?

spent every hour trying to pick apart that week
i still haven't come up with anything and my friends get good marks and alexander understands his schoolwork and i still stare at the wall anatomizing that week

whoever said fate exists was wrong.
i was a girl who walked on unsteady feet,
trying to not make eye contact
awkward, but somehow

happy.
now it is as if i know too much too soon
nothing thrills me, no.
i have been reduced to a glacous experiment

for gods' spindly hands-
their metal prods scooping out my corneal matter
and my grey one.
i remember i once told you

that i felt like a grasshopper in a sixth grade science class,
bathing in formaldehyde
how ironic- i had considered that notion alarming back then.

i remember you said "no, you're not"
"how awkward, being manhandled by the tweezers
of liebniez."

you smiled and told me
how much potential i had.
those were the antediluvian days,

the letter went on to describe a man i had talked to some months
before
who really i have forgotten about til now.

he swears gatsby is the best novel of all
time and tells me that he is writing a novel about a
Brown Law man, 1955, who lies about his life.

this seemed oddly topical to me.
we would talk about writing for hours,
life seemed to me a roman a clef on its own,

like its plot was vaguely familiar but
i was not myself, but the names
were changed.

now i speed through the antiseptic tunnel of
apathy, i wait for alexander's calls and tell my friends
i am sorry they feel that way or this way

i fail my tests,
i try to sleep,
i don't.

i write another letter now
and i hope to be able to open it in a few years
and i hope that i will feel better
i hope i will feel anything but this
this blindfolded hike, this set fetter.