Sleeping streets never seemed to tell my story
Finding nocturnal lights that illuminate littered curbs
Is exhilarating
My story is told in every sidewalk crack
In every sleeping man beneath graffitied bridges
That I trapeze past with my pencil in my hand
Because I found a street that tells my story
My story is written on an undecided path
The tail of a lit up firefly that I haven't had the
Sanity
To see in what feels like months
A rolling quarter following loose change
Down a dirty drain
I see graphite paths on every button in the elevator
The pad of my thumb cleans whichever floor I please
There's my story,
Dirty fingerprints and broken stiletto heels
Writer's block and spilled coffee
Pollutants in the air that block my connection with the stars
But my story is up there too
Hidden behind naive smog,
Written sloppily on the purple moon
I find it on the roof of every building
Peeking over the edge
To remind my slowing mind
That my heartbeat can still quicken
That adrenaline is still my favorite drug
So as to tell myself I'm still who I was when I had no words hidden in sidewalk cracks,
Or tucked in the craters of the moon
I'm still the girl writing on confined walls
Chapters preceding the clutter of city streets
Perfectly formatted scripts
Of repetition and grey
Until the binding finally gave up on encasing unimportance
My story is written on the back of a plane ticket
On leaves falling past me and crunching beneath my rolling suitcase
On the palms of my mother's hands as she grips my favorite sweater
On the ridges of my spine as I hunch over my desk for another sleepless night
On the lips of a whistling street vendor
My story is written with the words of the people I meet
My story is written in the foundation of every wrong turn I take
Every building I scale
Every missed train
Words cling to the edges of the river and erode onto the banks that I hike over
I found my story in the knit cap that I throw over my messy hair
In the remnants at the bottom of my teacup