when she was four she tied balloons to her wrist.

they always rose, she knew. balloons always found the clouds.

she sat in the grass with her legs crossed and fastened string after plastic string to her arm, and until her hand turned blue she waited

waited to rise.

when she was ten she smashed a hold in the frozen water across the street.

water always carried people away
it ran when they couldn't run themselves
and frozen water,
she figured,
would be slower--
less harsh but it would bring her far from home all the same.

white and blue as the clouds she'd longed for,
they pulled her from the frigid water
six miles downstream

even fastened to a hospital bed with 'suicidal' harshly painted on her soul
she knew she didn't belong

when she was fifteen she joined the party,

older kids were swallowing their sorrows and threading out their despairs in a pitiful drug-induced slumber

and she watched with a syringe in her hand, as read to join them as she was to die.

she was born to die.

and so the needle in her arm and the tragedy on her breath was enough to help her rise.

and as her eyelids turned back to icy blue and her identity was wiped clean she felt a pressure against the crisscrossed skin of her wrist

and as her mind followed her heart out of the world she would have sworn it was a black balloon

that carried her to oblivion.