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has the time really come to mend The Mistake? with the letter finally finished, all that was left was for her to muster the courage to send it off. she worried that her words would be misconstrued. or worse, deflected, so that when they bounced off of his shielded heart that had become so full without her, they would scrape and puncture her delicate skin like daggers, and remain embedded in her flesh forever, so that she may never forget the foolish decision she once made, and how it really did change everything.

she felt cheap for knowing.

with it all down on paper, it was almost more difficult to convey, and she felt as if periods and indentations weren't enough. what she truly required was charts and diagrams, visual representations of the complexities and complications of her short history-a bar graph of truth. she made sure to write it down becuase she feared that she might forget, and confuse what really happened with some other, more palpable version she used out of convienence, or self consciousness, or some combination thereof. (a girl's got to have some secrets, doesnt she?)

she wanted to write it all down because she thought that maybe some other truth would become visible during editing. some fact that she had hidden from herself would, via the reworking of her own words, be revealed to her. always looking for reasons, but ceasing to find them, she read and re-read her own passages, dictating her secrets to herself again and again in hopes of learning something new.

not for the first time she snapped back to reality and found herself underground. a terrifying realization: how easily she forgets. how easy it was to fool herself into settling for something else. (Here, her mother's words haunted her.) she knew she was a sucker for it. love with out feeling, going through the motions without any meaning. here we are, we play the part. we touch and I cant feel it.

it's my goddam quarry.

when she got to the city, her scars began to peel open, and the bood stained her sheets and her clothes, and everything she touched for days, so that even virgin things had become triggers. she missed him, but the pain was so dull, that just when it became unbearable, she could switch it off. Because what hurts the most is that soon, it won't hurt at all.

The Mistake still haunted her, and though it had been so long, she was still able to work herself up so that her stomach became a vortex like it had before, and her throat contracted as if it had been yesterday. healthy was not quite the word, but vitamins did so very little. and then, a secret: what made her most afraid was that she might miss him forever.

i heard they were naked when they got busted

couldnt stop tounging the sore spot inside her mouth, the metallic taste creeping into her brain by wire, a snapshot of her heart beating too quickly and her eyes lingering open though they longed to close long ago. "i like to watch you," she offered, and it was the truth.

her hair was still wet and as their feet brushed the sidewalk, she watched him drive away. the street was quiet still but the air was sticky and she felt bittersweet and cliche but her insides contrated into what most would consider a smile. she said it hurts but its worth it.

dear universe,

you could have told me it would be like this. (but i wouldnt have believed you if you had tried.)

"it feels like coming home" she said, "when home is so far you have to run away to get there." upon arrival, she realized that she would not could not stay, and that even after all of this, a taste is all she would get.

we are old people.

coming home was like remembering. and she felt as if (and this was a feeling she had felt before, but now more than ever) she was spread out, not stretched but strewn, piecemeal. shards of her heart in many places at once, distanced both by highway miles and the space inside her skull where the emotional counterparts were kept, protected. this made it hard to experience the joy or pain of having invested those pieces of herself, as they seemed to cancel eachother out, leaving her tingling, but absent.

she begged her faith not to leave her, but as it crept, heavy with shame, beyond her reach she realized that she was alone again. as she mouthed the words, the truth, but mostly her fears into the night she imagined taking a steaknife to her own weaknesses. its true there would be blood, lots of it. but with time the skin would heal and toughen beyond recognition. and her lies would be as good as truth.

legs shakey, recently reunited with the stars, she wondered, almost screamed it, "was i ever a real person to you, even then?" but held her tongue because some part of her still believed that this was growing up.

No. 9

she told him all her secrets, and he looked at her as if he had always known. for a moment he was perfect, and his perfection disolved into her disdain, and she felt small and naked and it was if she had been acting, a game that she had played and he hadn't noticed. but the lies she told were the truth, and he had seen them all bubbling beneath the transparency of her skin, and he had pulled them out, each slimy strand of her insides, and laid them out. his sticky breath made each one shiver and shrivel slightly, but when it was over, she watched him hold the silvery things in his palms. and he made her loose promises to protect her secrets that she didn't expect him to keep but hoped that he might anyway.