for years she kept quiet
like a bottle brimming,
screwed so tight she couldn't quite get the cap off
even if she wanted it to.
she set her bottle on a shelf of a room,
a room very rarely visited.
she herself avoided the room, letting it collect dust.
instead, she'd try to get into others rooms.
opening their bottles,
with caps much easier to twist off.
"pour it out,"
she'd say.
"i'll help clean up."
so pour, they did,
and clean, she did.
but nobody remembers who cleans,
only that they spilled.
with empty bottles,
they'd empty their memories too
and along she went, onto
opening more doors and emptying more bottles.
cleaning more messes.
but her own bottle, already full,
was now pressing urgently against the cap.
the door to her room with her bottle had been knocked on by few,
but between spills and clean-ups,
she was too occupied to answer.
running out of doors to open and bottles to spill,
she turned her attention
to the now-bursting bottle in the room
that was emptier than ever.
no knuckles knocked on the door at this point,
so alone she sat with her bottle.
she gripped the cap, beginning to tug to the side.
it budged, pushed up by the liquid
and pulled off by her shaky hand.
it leaked a bit,
she didn't react, for this was how the other bottles emptied too.
little leaks at first, then puddles.
unfazed, she fought the cap off and immediatley found
it should have stayed on.
out poured the years of neglected content,
creating a mess bigger than she'd ever had to deal with
in all her years of spilling and cleaning.
overwhelmed, she decided to do what she did best
and went to go gather her cleaning supplies.
she soon realized all of her cleaning skills had been
wasted on others, and she was now defenseless.
defeated, she now sits alone in the sea
of the now-empty bottle's contents.
dealing with a mess unlike the others,
different in that the mess is hers
and hers to clean alone.
no knocks on the door, for everybody
was enjoying the bottles that she had emptied.
with their doors wide open,
bottles empty of problems,
rooms full of people,
not bothering to remember
about the girl
who had spilled so much
she forgot how to clean.
