Space is how
I love and feel loved
​sometimes.

Freedom is
performing, playing,
briefly a continuous, 
endless part of the cloth
of stars and earth and beings and hearts beating and breaths
and at least I feel like I'm in my own skin 
when I play.

I fight hard for
my lines in the sand.

Cross me, 
watch me burn.

Sickness has a way
of spreading, consuming, engulfing
our souls in a way
that can be never ending.

One part infected turns a whole body inflamed,
a mind set ablaze with disease, 
an all-encompassing malaise.

Coming out the other side,
a shell of who we once were.

A simple question:
"how have you been?"
An answer: 
"not fully here, a remnant of who I was,
some parts gone, redone."

I'm out now. 
The other side,
an unfamiliar world.

I knew what we were doing.
I knew exactly what you were thinking.
Call me crazy, but I knew.
I knew what each touch meant.
I knew what the extra moments said.
I've been here before.
My first time around, it weighed me down.
This time I know, I know
this won't stay. 
So don't say a word
about it.
I knew what we were doing.

I live my life in half-truths.
​And what is it that you do?

These thoughts are not
fully formed.

These whisperings do not
feel clear to me.

These words cannot be pulled
​from my lips.

She was born with silence in her skin.
She learned to never let them in
let them in.

I started to,
started to slip away.
I flailed and gasped,
grabbed the edges of me,
blurred the edges of you.
I don't know how
to hold on and sink 
into the grays, the in betweens.

I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying.
I don't know what I need,
but I know what I don't need.
​It's a start.

You're better when I'm gone.

I'm fuller when you're gone.
​
I may not always stand steady,
but I am my own sense of home.

I am my own sense of home.

I can't feel the edge of myself.

​How sweet, they cry.