i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me; if you dust off my skin enough, you'll see traces of the sighs we exchange — spilling down gracelessly, they bruise a fragile skin. i have mastered the art of naming them after wild lilacs.

maybe for once, i can say that i am soft enough to grow flowers on my wrists. my lungs. my sternum — all the parts of me that hurt.

but i know too well all about screaming in barren lands. i have thrown my poems in a forest fire. i have forgotten how to breathe without hands around my neck. i have wished to fall on a sword, way too many times to still call these open wounds as bruises — these bruises as flowers — these flowers as soft.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me — kindly, and yet, how can i tremble over gentle things? maybe pain isn't what it always is, and i wish to unlearn this language — the mother tongue, whose every word i know by heart. and maybe one day, when it sighs my name, i finally will stop sighing back.

but now, this bed is caving in under all these lilacs and glassy, distant eyes. oh, such a classic case of a girl gone mad at the sight of sunbeams on dying flowers — aching in silence, as she watches it all.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me. and outside, the sun rises in vain.