you (excerpt)

You are on the floor, palms pushed against the ground, searching for relief. This is a piece of you, the fragment trying to magnetize back into something you can call complete. But as your legs pick you up, you wonder if you were ever actually whole. Whole like your mother’s key lime pie before you sunk your pinky in its middle. 

You rhythmically tend to your wounds. You cradle your limbs in your hands and practice sculpture, molding mugs and plates from which to eat breakfast. You paint them the way you painted horses and mirrors as a child, blending purples with blues, to make a bruise that wouldn’t hurt.

At a café in between broken lampposts, you sit upright in a metal-backed chair muttering notes under your breath. You are talking to yourself as you pen thoughts, knuckles firm around a green notebook: “my shoulders are warm”, you say, “worn in like a plum’s bruise”. You utter your emotions into the ceiling fan, hoping someone will take them off your hands. You think of your mother picking you up from elementary school, asking if you’ve made any new friends besides the ones in your books. You shake your head, muttering a soft “no”. Your mother replies, saying she can’t hear you when you mumble like that. You don’t think there is much of a difference between mumbling and talking, maybe only that one is surer of themselves. You have an overdue library book collecting dust in the bag beneath your seat, but you are allergic to dust so you think about your mother again and the library card she never let you keep. You now keep time with accumulating due dates. You find pleasure in reading hand-me downs, but as you step over the black, frayed rug at the library’s entrance, you wonder why you are always meant to blur the shape of your footprint with another’s before settling somewhere new. You aren’t sure if it is beautiful or unsettling to wipe away destinations past as you step into a room. When you turn to leave, the security guard tells you to come back soon. Something tells you, you will always come back, but something deeper in your skin tells you that maybe your mother is right and you ought to find a place that will remember the soles of your shoes and cast them into pages you can give back to the local library on Exeter Street. 

You sit with your hands clasped, waiting for the bruises to show in just the right spot so when you press their middles, you grin, because you think they look just like the center of a ripe blueberry.