Soft Animal

What is wrong with me that I don’t believe. That I refuse to see what is right in front of me. I don’t remember at all the girl I was before. It is as though my brain were gauze, wrapped up like a wound in cotton bandages and tape.

You know what is the most exhausting feeling? The second guessing of every single goddamn thing. The madness of circling around and around in the mind without relent and in the end never getting anywhere. Scrambling like a rodent down into a bottomless hole.

It’s growing dark out as you start touching me. A finger along the throat. I wish I could say I feel something but to be honest, I really don’t. My bones are liquid metal. My skin aches for nothing in particular, not even this. The sickness in the pit of me which snakes about the rib cage like black roses. Soaking it in gin like a surgical sponge discarded inside the intestine, like a pummeled wedge of bitter fruit.

You know what is the saddest feeling? Knowing the shape of your own shell, each of its protective curves and spindles. How the salt of unpredictability bores tiny holes in the fragile pearlescent stone.

It happens in the stoic darkness of the passing of time, imperceptible. The way it tenderly curls around you, bends your soft body into a comma or an apostrophe. A break in the story, a pause pregnant and dying on the vine. How you always feel like something better should come next, though, for the life of you, you couldn’t tell a soul where the glittery streets of better are supposed to lead.