i want to crush your bones beneath my teeth, grinding ‘til the sandy calcium and my saliva churn out pearls, and i will wear them as a necklace, brushing against my collarbones, my breasts, my heart, and you will know what it is like to be worn out by the idea of a person.

i want to shave your hair to a barren field, acutely aware of the awkward angle of each coarse mine, tucked away inside the foothold of each spilling word, sticking out askew of your scalp as if you know that it hurts just as much to display what you don’t feel as it is what you do.

i want to carve your nails into patterns, sculpt a cameo into each of twenty rough canvasses, forgetting that, of course, the blood inside will anguish and pour, making for a red-splattered enamel engraving instead of the delicate layered radish display i had so wanted, but then, who doesn’t remember how it feels to get everything you wished for but not quite.

i want to forget that unbearable tightness of feeling, scrape and scrape into my stomach to remove the nervousness that i so relished in when i was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, but now i am seventeen and there seems to be a difference in me, less “him” storming the towers and more “me” smashing the brick without help, and i’ve accepted that he could have been my prince, were we not so scared, but we were, and i am, but not about him anymore.

i want to know that i encompass the best of her, that i can wear their promise on my left middle finger like the precious irony in her strength and her weakness and embody her grace and her poise and her unconditional love and his constance and his authoritative youth and it’s not feeling so sad, just fine, so long as i can remember to thank her for her years with me, even if i allow myself to remember that when it mattered most, i forgot.

but

i want to forgive myself for my “maybe next time”s, forgive myself for writhing in my own agony when i realised there wouldn’t be a “next time,” reconciling my slippery, coiling feelings in the sensation of wrapping myself in reconstructed cloth and unfamiliar stitchwork but soaking it in something that was distinctly me and her, and i feel better despite chipping my teeth on your bones and nicking my hairline with metal (in vague honour of her, i think now, with more wisdom than i should have at seventeen) and filing my fingers to marrow and pulp.

i want to feel okay with the fact that i feel okay, and i don’t need to prove it with “strength” or the overwrought words of someone who knows a similar pain but who will never know mine or hers or even his hers; it is my bough to bear, my five-year maybe-love and my sixteen-year infinite-love, that will sit in a crevice between my heart and my lungs and i will wrap it in shriveled-up flower buds that have somehow lived when she did not and scraps of my own life.

somehow, i know it will thrive.