letting go
it’s so ******* annoying how i still can remember exactly how many freckles you have, and how many grains of sugar in your coffee you always add. every place i go has your shadow following me, and it is only after five minutes on the bus that i realize i’m sitting where you used to sit. you are stuck on me like lint on fabric and i have no money to buy a lint roller. parts of you are still fidgeting under my skin and we are still in physical contact even though you are five thousand miles away. we are touching even when we are not touching. welcome to the world of irony. you know, this is like stepping onto thin ice with iron weights attached to your ankles. this is holding up a lit match and going down a tunnel asking for Death. this is walking up to you and presenting my white, creamy neck and waiting for you to snap it. i just want to bleed, you know? stop twisting the **** knife in my heart. everyday i walk on crushed eggshells when all i want to do is bruise my knuckles and bleed out in front of your house, in front of Her. you keep asking me to let go, let go let go let go let go and i want to laugh. you are sewn onto my skin, you are on my teeth, you are in my lips. you are here, you are there, you are EVERYWHERE. how about i tattoo the exact words you used when you told me that my thighs needed to sign the divorce papers, or when you told me i needed a face transplant, on your skin, then told you to rub it off only with sandpaper? how long would it take, then? most of the time i feel like i am the gas station, standing in the middle of nowhere, saying ‘take me. here, take this part. take me, take me, take me.’  to everyone who stops by. and so they do. and so i fall apart. i self identify as the finger that keeps touching a naked flame and burning myself each time. i also self identify as a being stuck in a skin that does not fit me. you are like the glass shards that are impaled in my mind, so clingy, yet refuse to acknowledge my existence. i want to splash buckets of paint on white walls without seeing your face inside, and i want to be static once again without hearing your voice. i want to be able to rub you off my skin with sandpaper, burn you off with fire, peel you off my scalp, but i can’t. i can’t. i can’t i can’t, because in the famous words of Kate Moss, 'you're in my veins, you ****'.

i’m looking at myself in the cracked mirror of the gas station’s toilet, smiling at the light rippling from the cavities of my body. some days i feel as fragile as porcelain and others as unfeeling as concrete, and age has become but a number on the candles i blow out every year. some days i crave a breathing object to surround my words with and others, i weep for more letters from the milky way. i settle back into my skin and wonder how to overcome the hurdles― airplane phobia; academic failure; life vision blurring. my days are filled with wandering through empty halls of dead museums pondering over the meaning of HER expressionless features, as i fill my brain with aimless trains that wreck my sanity. these make me want to lie in the pond and allow the moss to seep into my lungs; i want to play tag in a cramped store selling China and glass and even more, i want to feel what it’s like to feel the dandelions under my toes as we dance to music only we can hear. we will smear the blood on our lips to our cheeks and laugh at the prim and proper girls. we will occasionally come apart and put each other back together, leaving a few pieces out. we will trespass into abandoned carparks and lie there waiting for a car to run over us, until our vision turns blueish grey. this is how we will slowly acquire the lost fragments and this is how i will write myself a new body.

i.  parts of my life are slowly blurring out of focus and i’m only left with the vision of an impaled heart on a fishhook. i want to quickly grow up, and yet i don’t. i dream of long train rides accompanied by good music and books, and dream of meeting the person who will morph to be the other half of my body. i store a jar of empty promises in my room and they are getting fuller as i meet more people. the irony is present.

ii.  i’m sick of seeing art forms caressing glittery pretty words that hide the harsh world. i want to see more paintings of crying women, more baring of the inner souls, more bared ankles and twisted bones. i know the secrets you think you hide behind your tight jaws and everything boils down to nothing when atoms collapse upon each other and eyelashes are trimmed. there is something romantic behind skin on skin contact and fluttering eyelashes and i will stop at nothing to capture them in black & white.

iii.  lessons on how to escape your body are filled with applications and i wonder where they want to escape to. bruised knees are tangled to the rhythm of church music as the professor reads page after page of rotting letters to a room full of skeletons. clear your throat and cobwebs in your heart, for spring is headed here and warm bread will soon take the place of cold carcasses & wilted flowers.

i shift in my grave.