I was born again at nineteen,

In a hospital with windows thick as milk-glass and nurses made of cardboard.

I came in slow and lazy,

Stripped at the door and wrapped in sheets thin as paper.

My heart,

The flutter of a frightened bird against the fragile cage of my ribs;

The way it falters and falls back into silence until it is touched again.

Someone, somewhere, will pick it up;

It will grow so full, too full to bare – and then it will empty again into nothing.

I have never learned to make enough room to love and breathe at the same time.

It cannot be fixed, the way that grief pours out like love.

They try to hold me in their hands, and maybe just a taste will fix me;

Maybe if they try hard enough, they can just fuck the sad right out of me.

Maybe they can climb inside my belly and split it open from the bottom,

The ocean inside, let everything go empty.

Would that stop all this longing, all this hurting?

There is a ghost living inside of me and I could not tell you his name.

Her name,

I do not know if this ghost is me or everything that has been done to me,

And I do not know which I am either.

The walls were blank, a mirror image of the eyes that spent each day staring back at them.

It smelt like the kind of death that you have to live through, like salt and blood and comfort.

There is a comfort in knowing that I am not the only little girl that got lost in the night forest,

That could not let the dark go.

I have held this weight for so long that my arms would not know how to be empty if I sat it down.

The woman in the room next to mine sees stories that are not there,

She does not know how to rest, is always wondering about what she is looking for and where she is meant to be going.

She is the odd one out when we are put like sheep into our box,

When we remember to forget that we are all like her sitting in the corner, our own dark forests –

How we could always stumble into hers and burn in a way that we have not yet.

I do not think that it would be better to touch my pain without having first named it.

I do not think that I would be better for forgetting it.

I do not eat here.

Instead, I meet a wolf in sheep's clothing, a man –

I feel something while he is picking me apart with his eyes, finding answers between meat and bone.

I let him press his mouth to mine when no one was looking,

I ignored it when he tried to swallow me whole.

I have never said yes and meant it with my whole heart.

And this is what happens when lost girls pity wolves,

The monsters, the men old enough to be their lost fathers –

And with the same sad look in their empty eyes.

The men that jangle like spoons in pockets, like the looseness of their teeth;

The will get stuck beneath your skin and you will never be able to pry them out.

Let them take one bite and they will not stop chewing until you are gone,

Or at least until you want to be,

Until there is nothing good left.

Men like my father do not want to love me, they want to own something in a way that it can never be taken from them.

I do not lead the wolf to my home but I might as well have.

Sometimes I cannot breathe with open eyes,

Sometimes I swear that the wolf has crawled through the window and crept into my bed.

I wake up drowning only to find that it is on my own tears,

I find that the memory has found me again –

I find that it has never left, that I have carved myself from it.

Hacksaw to the bone;

And do you think that it is something to be heard, when a star dies?

I think that stars are ghosts, I think that we are all the same;

Lost children in the forest, and what happens when the breadcrumbs rot?