i. When you were young, all you knew about what it meant to bleed were the scrapes on your knobbly little knees. A paper's edge dug into your fingertip and there it was: blood. You didn't know that you had it all wrong—that bleeding was not a fingernail cut too close, skin peeled from lips or a loose tooth being pulled.
ii. Sometime later, you fall in and out of love for the first time, and you learn what it means to bleed from the inside. This is not a hemorrhage, this is the sun shrivelling and the stars sprinkling dust of dead celestial bodies over you.
iii. All around you, weeping souls leave bodies that are then buried in the wretched ground, with the worms and soil. You love a person who is breathing one moment and fading the next, and you bleed. Your lover hits you and the sting on your cheek hurts less than the crestfallen thrum of your heartstrings, and you bleed. A death here, a loss there, a dash of darkness somewhere—and you now know.
iv. You now know bleeding not as the crimson liquid that seeps from your wounds, flowing out of azure veins, but as a mere feeling of utmost despondency. Oftentimes, you bleed most when there is no visible blemish at all.
YOU ARE READING
Elucidation
PoetryI was meant to disintegrate to stardust; but instead, I was reduced to rubble of old buildings and broken skies. © Copyright 2017 by Lily White. All rights reserved.
