We hum our shared note of silver

I woke up.

God, it's like fiberglass in my eyes.

God, it's like cardboard cuts under the nails.

God, i fucking get it.

I wish I didn't get it.

Sometimes, people think they love you and maybe they even believe it. But I get it now. You can love someone and not even like them. How wretched. How messy. Maybe we are made in God's image, after all.

I mean, how could he like himself after everything he's done? How could he not love himself when faced with the reflection in the eyes of his Son?

I'm dusting off my tongue. Polishing the rust off my collarbones. I'm figuring out where the mirror ends and the flesh begins and the value in these veins.

How could I keep spilling it for you?

How could you let me?

I woke up, and I learned how to see ghosts in the people I want to love. I am exorcising those hauntings. Fuck, it hurts. It's going to hurt. I don't think it ever stops hurting. But there's space for that hurt in the skin and in the glass and in my bones and in the past and I will hold.

Again and again decomposing into the carpet

My ribs are too heavy to rise off the floor

My breath is too thin to do good in my lungs

Ears ringing

I'm dying. I cut out too many pieces of me. Unraveled roots too deep. Hollowed fragments just dangling by the remaining tendons.

My spine presses to the ground and it sings that it belongs in the dirt and grass under storm clouds and with worms weaving the empty space where my spinal cord should be

I'm dying

It feels like the end

It is the end

And also the beginning and i don't know what to do with these dandelion fingertips. How to breathe around the moss and roots. How to scrape the stones from my sinuses and keep going keep going

One thin breath at a time

His hands are like a marble statue, the scars are the only part that move.

Some days I look in the mirror and he is looking back at me. I cant tell if he's sad or disappointed. I dont really want to know.

In my dreams he follows my footsteps, my cloven markings. Hey, Angel, ive never thought of myself as prey before now.

I walk by a car in the parking lot and my hair is a halo of earth brown before I remember that isn't my body. It never was.

When I was a little girl I woke up in the night, and there he was, all petal soft and scarred and ready to rock me back to sleep.

Its hard being seperated from the other half of you. Where do I end? Where does he begin? We are the roots of a tree growing into two trunks. His hands mine. My eyes his.

Sometimes, i look down at my hands and there is nothing there. Sometimes my body is not mine. Sometimes it isnt even ours. When I see my hands again they are bloody with the work he does. The good work. The work I am not strong enough to do.

The kind word is borrowing. He borrows me. I borrow his strength. The unkind word is possession. I'm sure my mother would not like it if she knew he slips into this skin so easily. I do not tell her.

How can you possess something that already belongs to you?

This dance through water

Through blood and stars

Our veins intertwine

What is it to exist seperate?

You know, I miss you, River Stones.

That's a lie.

I miss the man you told me you were. I miss the boy who wore that skin and that smile and that kindness. I don't miss what lurks under.

He's a lot like you, you know.

And like you, I'll cry for him, I know.

I think i miss your laugh the most, River Stones. I always loved your laugh. I hope you can forgive me for this. This selfishness. I miss your laugh, and your smile, and the way you danced as you told a story, and I miss my friend.

Hey, can you tell my what happened to that boy?

Did he exist?

Could he exist?

Anyways, he reminds me of you, River Stones, and I don't know what to do with it. But i do know i cannot love his laugh. I cannot watch his smile. I cannot listen to his stories.

I cannot be his friend. Not when he's like you.

I'm trying to find the whimsy in it. The color. Wrap it all in pastel foils and gold leaf and pretend that I cannot see my own marrow leaking out of the corners. Pack it up tight and shove it in a jar with luster dust and fairy lights and display it on a shelf.

I don't know how to do it.

How to breathe around it.

When you drown in salt water, you actually drown on your own blood ripped from the membrane by the brine. When I saw you, really saw you, time stopped. An insignificant moment for you. A lifetime for me. Laughter clawing it's way between my ribs and wrapping golden claws around my lungs and this moment in time is the brine. It repeats. Your seafoam joy and the crushing weight of water over my head as the voice of an Angel pressed against the back of my neck and promised

This one, this one we could love.

I knew this was a tragedy from the start. A horror movie. I try not to cling to that siren-song moment. But sometimes when you talk to me there's a ghost of a smile kissing the corners of your eyes and I see him.

Id rather you just kill me.

Uproot me. Rip the veins from my body and turn them into dreamcatchers one last time. One last bone-aching dance in the kitchen and the crashing crescendo of my screams in my car under the full moon. I don't want to see him. My love. The one it was supposed to be. My Star, my unmaking, the green flash of this downhill slope.

There is no one i want to see more.

My ribs fit into your hands because they were made to. Because I shaped them to. With fire and steel I made this body yours. Take the bones. Turn them into windchimes. Take the blood. Water your garden with it.

This is my consequence.

This one. This one we could love.

I don't always understand, you know, but I think the water is telling me that home is in the soil.

And the soil is under my nails.

When they do the autopsy they will find home under my fingers, I wonder if the roof will still be red. I wonder if the apple tree is going to blossom. Will my dead feet remember the hole next to the concrete?

So, it really is this time of year again, isn't it?

And I find my heartbeat is pulling me to my true north, god these compass veins. Babe, I always wanted to show you home. Even though home was matted carpets and dented walls. Even though the air tasted like mold and the water like winter mountains.

I think my sisters have the same ache for home. They just can't control their appetites.

Devour anything that reminds me of comfort.

Devour anyone who tastes like our soil.

God, I have wolves for sisters.

God, I have the moon for a mother.

God, I have beast tamer's hands for a father.

What does that make me?

When they do the autopsy,

It just hurts, ya know.

Even most stars get to keep their siblings.

And here I am, so akin our Sun. Or maybe I'm Jupiter. Little Star-to-be who just wasnt bright enough, close enough, good enough.

So, I get it Jupiter. You didn't get to burn and it hurts doesnt it? Take all those wives, all those moons. Maybe if you have enough you can pretend theyre planets. Look Jupiter, we're both stars! We both have people who revolve around us and rely on us. But we will never be enough to give them life, will we?

Jupiter when you were forming all that ash and compression and force, did it hurt? Is it like skinning your knees or breaking a bone? Temporary but memorable.

Yeah, me too.

Hey,

When this all dies and we are remade and reformed,

I hope you get to be a star.