by Arianna James
You are the baby of the family. You are the baby of the family and they tell you to ground your feet in reality, to dig your heels into the dirt, scratch at the dead ground, feel the grime bury itself into your skin
(your biggest fear has never been about being buried alive. The thought of the decay, the filth, burying itself inside you has always been far more vicious fuel for nightmares)
and pray.
You
play hide and seek with the pinpricks of light in the dead
forgotten sky,
find histories in the nimble unknown,
and allow yourself at once to
simply be.
It was never supposed to be this way. You were never supposed to lose your wonder at the great unknown. Your universe was never supposed to go so dark. You track your way across winding maps, fold them for shortcuts and highways, and find your way from continent to continent with the tip of a purple crayon; you have always been so prone to running away.
Like a light bulb exploding in your hand, the fragile skin of a balloon giving way under your desperate fingernails, you have always been so devout to your own destruction.
Your mother shows you a movie when you’re four, about children who are lost and never found – there are many X’s on the map, but no one quite ever wants to find these treasures – to try and stop you from running. She has tried, they have all tried, but no one will ever bind your feet. You have always been a wild thing, untamable in your youth, and so utterly lost in the knowledge of your invincibility. The ordinary was your only impossibility.
Your mind is a garden
with thick, insurmountable, walls
armed to the teeth with the thorns of everything you’ve ever forgotten.
Ugly words fall like rain from the painted mouth of mother, like every blow is another bulb beneath the earth, another punch to the dead earth’s chest, eager, desperate, for just another breath. Every attack, every clash of words that taste too much like the steel of swords, strips another star from you, blinks out another light in your sky, like you were a creature born to live without light.
You are the baby of the family, and your garden grows tall with every passing moment, every passing day. Your flowers blot out the sun, your stars, like the bodies under the hot, beating, earth aren’t the corpses of your every dream, like every flower, every blossoming bruise, isn’t another witness to the only type of love that you have ever known.
And You
are in the highest room,
of the tallest tower,
still trying to count the flowers.
