light

A faucet that won’t shut off-
my body leaks slowly,
fatigue pooling at my feet.

Exhaustive smiles hang from me,
a row of rusted shower curtains,
each one dragged shut behind
a version of myself I no longer believe in.

I wait for someone-anyone-
to look past the practiced grin
and into my eyes and say:
You can fall apart now.
Say it like kindness.
Mean it like a command.

I’m reading a book where a woman kills her husband
and then falls silent-
just sits, sedated,
drooling in the quiet,
her mouth open like a broken drawer.

She doesn’t speak.
Doesn’t perform.
She rots outward instead of inward,
the way fruit bruises from the skin in.

She is a lamp without a bulb.
Still standing.
No longer useful.
Blessed.

I crack a window for air.
The insects flood in-

wings jittering like unmedicated thoughts,
drawn to the lamp they can’t understand.

They beat themselves silly against its shade,
all that blind love for light.

I cannot kill them.
I shoo them out slowly,
their thousand glassy eyes
reflecting the shape of someone they fear.

They mistake my mercy for menace,
and I can’t blame them.
Kindness has a body too,
and mine looks too much like threat.

This is how I live:
waving away what I attract,
smiling while I soften at the edges,
folding myself into palatable pieces-
bite-sized, blameless, barely whole-

because I was raised on books with pastel covers and hollow promises,
pages that whispered nice girls help themselves-
as if the helping wasn’t just another kind of bruising.

The cycle repeats.
I smile again.
The bugs come back.
They always do.