On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel? How’s your back
holding up after a year of grey haze, bottomless mistakes, bleeding broken
fingers digging deeper every day?
I’d like to respond, but I’ve scraped dirt and clay from rock
bottom to smear across my lips and lay beneath a summer sun that never quite
faded to winter. My cotton-ball brain half-expects the shock of an alarm clock
to let me know when I’m done baking, wake me up so I can kill the sound like a caterpillar
hitting snooze. Give me just a few more years in this old cocoon before I have
wings and expectations of beauty forced upon me like a genetic crucifix. Give
me the blissful ignorance of stability and warmth and forward-looking
statements spun like a straitjacket around me. Give me the awkward shifting of
familial threads when they realize they knew me vicariously all this time, filtered
through a chrysalis, softened by safe love and fear of a challenge. I can feel
the cracks forming on my sun-baked mask as I try to stay asleep.
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