#memory series

Empty Leash - Memory 1

“Smile,” she told me from behind a raised phone. I performed the requested act, smiling to the best of my ability, though my anatomy was not built for such a human action. I bare my teeth, pulling the edges of my mouth to the closest thing I could manage.

“I said smile. You aren’t smiling.”

Her voice was sharp with annoyance as she kneeled forward, placing her thumbs on either side of my mouth, beginning to stretch it as if I was made of plastic. She was so close, I could have bit her. One small bite would be all it took for her to bleed.

Yet her hands acted on a trust that I would remain docile.

I sat there, watching her perfect what wasn’t human — only to be faced with the fact she could never change the soul within this body.

Raison d’Etre Memory Series: New Identity

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Raison d’Etre Memory Series: Prospects

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i remember your mouth slanted against mine, the curve of your smile peppering down my skin and i felt adoration, i felt worship, i felt your prayer seeping out of your lips as you dared to reclaim me as your own.

my god, you said, eyes skidding closed as i threaded myself with you, where have you been –

post-post-game is what we call five 16 year old girls sprawled out on the floor of their youngest friend, heads hurting something fierce and their morning breaths somehow more rancid than usual. i wake up and i am tucked beneath another, her arms hugging my neck, the braid I had tried to make while hazed by chloe’s moonshine somehow still intact. there is another, sleeping away a hangover underneath my feet and her head stuffed in between pillows and someone else’s lap.

I remember pancakes cooking, downstairs, waking up the sleepiest girl in the room, and suddenly we were no longer hungover teenagers trying too hard to be grown but rather children, alive again, awoken by a single father doing his best with a daughter he has to care for and her friends that seem to never be home

the bannister creaked under the weight of five girls crashing down the steps

& my god, we do not know how to be normal

because all i could think was “i kissed you”

all i could think was “your lips were so soft and i miss the way you taste”

and i think that was left unsaid between us. you say, “we wouldn’t have worked out, you know?”

i blink. i remember limbs, in the front seat of your car; shirts, half-off; the sun, beating down on my bare back. i blink.