i am who i am. not a name, not a number, not a reset button. not hair or clothes or wordless things that call to me from big cities. i'm staring at hair and it's staring right back, but you're staring at me and i've chosen to look the other way. trains rush by in the rain on slippery tracks and i'm afraid they'll never stop moving, rushing blindly forward in torrents of what must be starving icy thunder. we are the passengers and we're scared as hell. but i am who i am, going nowhere in circles and and tracing petite diamonds with my fingertips (sans sparkle, of course.) down the sinkhole i spiral with no wings to catch the air beneath me, but where is the bottom? i was born without the remote: just another Fast-Forward Girl floating too high off the surface of her cereal bowl. i'm stumbling out of bed on cold mornings because the car is here and i've got to go somewhere other than this place, somewhere with a big red X saying "I am here" in the very center of my universe. i am who i am, and maybe that will be enough for you. you hold my hand and say nothing at all and somehow that will always be enough for me. i don't ask for your forever, i ask for a finger, a tooth, a song. give me a beat, a broken mirror, and mile-high windows and i won't be lost anymore. i'm up for sale, more or less: would anyone ever want these small blue eyes that have seen so little? she's gladly trading bottle flames for smashed headlights because she takes what she can get. i'm writing poetic so you can't make assumptions, writing noetic because my mind is infinitely collapsing in on itself. still, i am who i am, no future written on legal pads or pink Post-Its or in the leftover foam of coffee cups. i carved my name into the piano because i thought it belonged there, took a pen and busted it to see what sour blue ink would look like on the white concrete below. i am who i am. you are thinking i am just another 2-by-3 in someone's back pocket, but in a life full of pins and needles, i am the blue balloon with the red letter trailing sweetly behind.
don't think.
on the X i yell to the eggshell sky, "I am here!" but no one is there to catch the whisper.