day 2: hard turn

Figure of a walking skeleton,

cloth, like skin, stretched taut over gaps I shouldn't see.

I know you, there.

I think about you sometimes.

On days ruled mostly by sleep,

you wear a smile into the soft spot of my temple

and I see the ease with which you move,

a different cloud in your eyes,

the arms that hold you up when your shaky legs aren't enough,

the same arms that you weep over in guilt.

The guilt that, for all the meals you've now eaten in the last twenty-one months, burns it all away. You're left with this.

Any fall is your end,

Every bone in danger of a break with strings.

Outside of a mirror, you look happy, and you should be.

Maybe you are. Maybe it's easy to make you a nightmare from here.

But I know the ghost story you told for no one but your organs--

before you intervened on Fate--

before you made another new line on your left palm.

I don't regret the pieces of heaven you had.

I don't regret shining a light on the hell you'd made for yourself

Both of them led me here

to the earth I'm standing on now,

and the free, mostly-solid limbs carrying me forward.