““when i left them, i painted myself burgundy and grey i stopped saying the words “please” and “i’m sorry” i walked into grocery stores and bought too many clementines, ordered too much Chinese, spent my last four dollars on over the counter sleeping pills that made my stomach bleed but my soul forget every time i wanted to tell you “i’m sorry”, i wrote you a poem instead, i said things like “i hope your mother calls you beautiful” to strangers and when boys with dry hands and broken eyes asked me on dates i didn’t hesitate no, didn’t even stop them when their hands grazed my breasts and when they moaned my name against my thighs i cried i opened the mail and didn’t tell anyone for a week that i got accepted into law school, i stopped watering the plants and filled the bathtub with roses and milk, when i got invited to parties, i wore blue jeans with white shirts, sat alone in some kitchen drinking hard liquor until some boys mouth made me feel like home i stopped answering the phone for a month, i didn’t like how my name tasted in his mouth but he was older and didn’t say things like “it doesn’t matter” and i think i went insane, my heart boiled blisters, i couldn’t understand why my bones felt like cages, i walked around art museums until closing, watched them lock up the gates and then open them up again the very same morning, i thought about clocks and how time was a deception of my fingertips, i had stars growing inside of me into constellations, and only when some man on the 9 AM bus asked me for the time did i realize that you cannot run from light igniting your lungs, you cannot run from yourself.””
