I have spent my entire life chasing a moment I will never learn how to pick up.

I grow moments, thick and full;

I realize that I do not know how to pluck them from the vines wound around my feet when it is already too late.

I shy away from being touched even when I am starving for it;

I find that I have never touched anyone without leaving a stain behind.

Sometimes I think that goodbye is a feeling, and sometimes I think that it is mine.

Sometimes I think that I only want the things that I shouldn't because they hurt,

And oh, how being numb has grown so unbecoming.

Please, fuck the heartbreak into me because I am empty without it.

Touch the memory of my skin until I weep against you –

I should have let you know that I am only a guest here.

I should have let you know that he only locked me inside when he decided that he did not want this body anymore –

When I did not want this body anymore.

That he only let me stay here because he knew that I had never learned how to work the locks –

And is that not the kind of thing that fathers are supposed to to teach their daughters?

I want you to know that you can still learn something from nothing.

I have never had a father,

I have only ever touched a ghost when he has held me -

Down.

He carved me from him, a twist of a wrist and how painful it is when everything in your body breaks at once.

How he held me down, his palm against the thrumming of my collarbone.

How he felt the beat of my heart with the same hands that he broke me with and

How now, I cannot stand to hear the sound of my own being.

He whittled me into the shape of his bed in the dark and now I cannot crawl from it.

The seems of his overwashed sheets are all that hold me together now,

And if I breathe too deeply there will be nowhere for my lost little pieces to rest.

Daddy, don't you know that secrets do not come out as easily as blood or sweat or tears?

I hold what I do not shed inside of me until I am bloated beyond recognition.

I almost forget that I am here until another man looks at me and then

I have to hide behind my teeth again.

Shame is a funny thing when it is the only feeling that you have ever known,

When it has become the only poem that you have ever written and looked at twice.

Plucking razor blades apart,

A whisper is still a word when you do not speak it,

Even when there is no one there to listen.

Each time that a scar fades, I add another.

I remind myself that I can speak even if it is in a language that no one else understands.

Shit or get off the pot -

And hasn't that always been the one to do me in?

How I am so good at doing things until they mean anything.

How I keep my collection of almosts tucked into the shoebox of my briar bush heart, and refuse to let them go –

Even when they hurt, especially then.

Hurting is the only thing that I have ever been really good at,

It is the only thing that I know how to do this well.

How I have called this hurting a life, these moments –

How I have held on for dear life to each one and still refused to live it.