Little Kestrel

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

But then I hold myself back, because I knew I’ll be burned too, once I start a fire that matches you.

city apartment: one bed, one bath they told me at the beginning of it all that there wasn’t enough room in their empty vodka bottle for me to squeeze myself into, but I tried anyways. they told me ‘the only way you’re getting in there is if you leave something behind.’ so I did, no questions asked. took out the cutting board and played operation with my heart. threw out my teeth so that I couldn’t bite my tongue anymore. drew a bullseye on my back and made darts out of my bones because everyone knows that you know best the ways in which to hurt yourself. and after all of that, the time and the idle conversations, being smaller wasn’t what I expected it to be. what I needed it to be. although to be left on a shelf once my mannerisms became familiar, left to grow dusty and immobile, isn’t what I was expecting either. this is not a metaphor for anything. sometimes it just hurts. mansion: spacious, new, never been lived in so, I thought that this time was going to be different. nobody would be packed into a space so tight that their limbs would become permanently fused together, ears pressed to knees for longer than the average shower. but what I didn’t think about was how easy it is to get lost when you only have one head and two cold feet and a compass that seems to think ‘north’ is synonymous with ‘the last room you cried in.’ so we played hansel and gretel, leaving bread crumbs on the bedroom floor to mark the places where we shattered and clumsily reassembled ourselves before the lights turned on. it wasn’t until a game of hide and seek that I found the door I’d entered through, somehow larger and more daunting than before. struck by the realization that the person I am now wouldn’t have bothered knocking, I left. I don’t know if anybody ever stopped looking for me, but I’d assume that they did. body: functional, heart is so big it’s become taxing for residents for eight months I burrowed, solitary, into my skin and tried to remember what my mother smelled like before I learned how to say goodbye to her. I let the bruises on my legs fade away, watching the colors as they disappeared like paint down the drain. I was shocked by the amount of vacant rooms in my chest but vacancy isn’t a permanent state of being so it’s likely that somebody loved this wallpaper at some point. there were cobwebs near my corneas and broken lamps in my thighs and I never thought the term ‘fixer-upper’ could be used to describe anything other than buildings until I studied myself in the mirror. here, the raw materials present themselves in their rawness and their durability. here is where I begin to rebuild.

All I ever asked for was to be remembered constantly by everything I ever touched.