cranium

There’s a perfect storm sitting inside my skin-shell; my face is the vacuous eye of it, taut with eerie calm, empty with stoicism - a silent nod yes without any gleam or flicker in the corners of my mouth, dull with acquiescence to a world that forgets time, forgets its own bloodline, forgets the location of the soul (it’s everywhere).

The little girl in pigtails who used to haunt my mother is sitting still at the bottom of the stairwell - has been for two decades - waiting with all her stories, drumming her fingers at the base of my skull. She’s glaring up at me through her lashes. She’s angry and she’s scared. She’s confused and refuses to age. She’s riddled with the holes carved out by her aggressors: rotting wads of flesh sit heavily in the pit of her womb, her throat, the back-half of her heart, her ankles, the flattened soles of her feet. From her open hands streams brilliant light, but she can’t walk so it ends up blinding her, ricocheting off the walls and circling back sharply into her eyes, illuminating the way for the people scurrying past her. Their thousand footsteps bog the track so she steps into their prints and sinks, drowning with the weight of memories that may or may not belong to her.

I glare back at her, an aged mirror with various cracks - to let the light in, of course - the ruthless aggression of a grown-up who involuntarily skipped childhood, who refused apologies and help when they arrived too late, who leaks salt everywhere whenever someone inevitably asks, “Are you okay?”

I’m sure that I’m okay, I’m just flooding myself clean ... but I want to pose the question back: Dear world, are you okay? Are you all quite fine ? I can’t help but hear everyone’s aching and it’s splitting my body into fractured fragments, so colossally disparate there’s no hope of sewing them up with gold. Perhaps I should make a mosaic of myself, and bury it in the ground, and someone could dig up the pieces and wonder how they looked whole. The earth could make nutrients of me and I’d finally be home. I’d finally be able to nourish everyone from the inside out.

I’d return to the ultimate cycle, and never again begin or end. I’d be forever; a quiet legacy.