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sometimes i think my body is a mausoleum no one visits anymore. there are flowers, yes, but they’re plastic, bleached by time and sun. i walk through myself like a tourist in ruins. columns cracked, tapestries moth eaten. the air smells like candle wax and something older than dust. everyone says i’m healing. i nod. i do not tell them that healing feels like taxidermy...you keep the shape, but nothing inside moves. i still wake up most mornings. this feels like an act of violence. not against myself but against the part of me that wants to go quiet. the part that sees beauty in stillness. in cold. in finality. you could call it death. i call it the only place i have ever felt understood. people say think of the ones who love you and i do i picture their faces as i sink deeper underwater holding my breath so they can keep breathing and somehow this is called survival the truth is i haven’t wanted to be alive for a very long time but i have become expert at impersonation smiling with my teeth like piano keys singing in the right key of normalcy drinking coffee nodding laughing at jokes i do not understand some nights i lie on the floor arms spread like a sacrificial offering and whisper apologies to the ceiling to god to myself to no one for still being here for not having the courage to disappear i used to fantasize about my funeral not out of vanity but as a kind of peace a gathering where no one expects you to speak just lie there beautiful untouchable done i do not die because you would cry and even in my ruin i cannot bear that so i wear my skin like mourning clothes black elegant impossibly heavy and i keep going not because i believe in tomorrow but because you do and that is enough to keep me for now tethered fragile trembling and unwillingly alive