Girl in pretty pretty colours with her hair all wild and bleach yellow like sunflowers, dress to her knees and a sunday school smile, she knew all the right ways to be young. Easier at 8 for a little girl to kiss her daddy's cheek and talk like a happy hurricane, easier to be weak and cry at all the right times, to grit her teeth at the gravel in her palms. Then boys became glasses of lemonade and she always poured too fast in her haste to be told she was pretty pretty in grey no matter that she didn't smile. She wanted them to love her anyway. When colouring pages became subjective and the colours she chose dejected, she gave up on that solidity and dove from the ledge that was innocence. Little girl became a vanilla queen of lies and solitude, loving the boyfriend with the razor blades for hands who only persisted to cut her open and ingest her youth. Girl is older now and sees memories like black and white photographs except the ones that are scored in red crosses and 'take your shame like pills, slide your fingers like a gun against your forehead.' She doesn't want to be alive but she doesn't want to be dead, for the sake of that father she used to kiss goodnight and the mother she remembers in a blue t-shirt with oven cleaner smeared on her left cheek. It's almost enough to make her smile again, thinking of the time the moon had come down from the sky to hold her heavy head to his chest, almost enough to be one more reason to stay. But not quite.