I woke one morning feeling like I didn’t belong in my own body— that the skin I saw was not my own but the flesh of a cadaver; I thought that the bones within me must be made of balsa wood and the deteriorating muscles were surely thin strips of fabric with no actual value.
I decided that it was not me on the inside, but someone else.
The sky outside my window was only a meager, pale shade of grey, like the ashes of what her body used to be, and I watched as the pale pink ribbon of the horizon began to bleed with the birth of a new day and I thought about how all those words you said to me were actually time bombs because when you first said them, I brushed them off but now all I can think about is them and my brain has been blown to kingdom come.
I think I might be brain dead.
But your school picture is still on my bedside table and when I look at it a fist grips down on my heart and I wonder how you are and if you’ve grown, I wonder if you’re even still alive anymore; my anxiety is a yew tree bending in a new formation influenced by the passing of time and minimal communication— I become someone I don’t know.
I think that we’re all born with a different destiny to follow but when you get right down to it, no matter how much you’ve changed, or how much I’ve changed, on the inside, we’re all the same— skeletons.
Except for the fact that I think I might be a barely surviving Hiroshima victim; a charred skeleton with no other contributing human element.
Sometimes I compare you to Chernobyl and I wonder if you ever draw that connection too.
I wonder what it’s like to be nuclear.
I wonder what it’s like to burn alive.
There are dark clouds churning in the early morning sky and I wonder if it might storm again like it did on that night when I drove home alone and that one song was playing on the radio over and over and over again and I couldn’t possibly shut it off because who was I to end the life of a beautiful, (highly relatable), song when it was just growing out of its babbling infancy and into its crescendoing teenage years?
If I were to write you a letter now I wonder what I would say, what I would tell you that I haven’t already, (accidentally), spilled to you in those rushed visits we had every blue moon—
I think I would tell you how you broke my heart; I think I would tell you how he shattered what was left; I think I would tell you how I don’t believe I have a soul anymore.