She begged, not with words,
but with the tremor of her breath,
A mercy, a reprieve,
as if the universe might pause,
Might halt this endless becoming,
this unbidden metamorphosis,
Where flesh and thought conspired to alter her,
To rend her from herself,
To make her foreign in her own skin.

The fist—bleeding, clenched—she hid,
Pressing its truth against the fabric of her dress.
A small white pill, bitter solace,
Dissolved beneath her tongue,
And with it, the last of her defiance.

Her eyes, black wells,
Not vacant but overflowing,
Too deep to see the bottom,
Too full of shadows to bear the light.
She moved in circles, circles without end,
The geometry of despair,
A craving for trust, for anything solid,
For anything that could stop her spinning.

And she waited.
God, how she waited.
For the stillness, the silence,
For something to meet her halfway.
But it never came.

She wasn’t to blame—
Couldn’t be.
A child, after all,
Only a child,
And the world so mercilessly vast.
And her, so terribly small.