I surround myself with every girl that I could have ever been,

I knock them all down.

I cannot bear to look into their sad faces,

Each my own.

The faded roadmaps of their eyes –

Wherever there is, I do not think that it could ever be far enough away.

Where am I supposed to go to find myself now?

Where do I lie this head, this heart, when I grow too weary to carry the memory of them

And the empty spaces where they used to be?

These ghosts, the thin sliced ribbons,

The edge of a silk razor;

There are some things that only pain will let you remember,

And everything inside of me is made of them.

Each beat of my heart a swallow,

I never know which taste I am getting.

It all tastes the same now.

Sometimes I pretend that I am drowning in my bed.

Take the blankets and twist them tight around my face, press;

Laugh as my head swims away and find peace in the suffocating.

How nice it is, to grow numb in a body that was always made for feeling.

I have learned to swallow around the sweat,

The spilt dreams,

The things that only come out to play when I am alone in the dark.

Alone,

Even when a boy is lying next to me in the bed that is supposed to be my own.

I wonder how I became the stranger in this situation too.

I am covering all this silence with words that I cannot make matter,

That bounce back to me,

As if to remind me that I do not matter either.

They stick here on this skin.

I am this throat that does not know how to speak,

That hurts as it quietens,

A pain deep in my belly.

Quiet girl, sweet girl:

These things that haunt the hallows of my body.

How, if I could, I would flee this dark place in the middle of the night.

And where would I go then?

Who could I be?