Dust

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I learned in chemistry that the world is just made up of tiny particles that clash with one another, so really everything and everyone is just dust with different densities.

Sometimes I wonder that a gust of wind comes strong enough and blows me away, and I end up breathed in by some boy in a small town in Tennessee who doesn't know I live inside of him, pieces of who I am lodged in his lungs. But then I remember that I am made of steel and glass and ice bones, it is raining out here and a tornado could come but I am a mountain of stone and I wouldn't move an inch.

Stella is a feather, she could fly away in a sunny day or up up up go like a balloon and never touch the ground again. They would wave and grieve and share war stories about Stella, inventing some sort of future for her, but I would know the truth, that Stella is just like me, that if she could buy a set of wings and live amongst the clouds she would never land.

The rain keeps falling, I should get off the roof but I don't know how to make the rain stop falling and the clouds to go away so I wait it out.

I feel the weeds that sprout between concrete cracks beneath my fingers as I get up and start running, I run until I can't feel my feet, I run until the floor is like water and then it's air and then it's nothing.

My heart spills out of my chest and it makes a mess on the floor but I keep running, I can't stop running, my throat starts to close up and my legs threaten to give but I keep running. I run until my skin starts shedding and I am just another feather, that's when I stop.

My feet aren't my feet anymore, the grass is beyond the horizon and the scrapes and bruises are gone. I open my eyes, my face is still an ocean but it seems to be drying out, as I try to get up I am forced to realize that I am still glass and rock and ice bones.

Stella is still laying there, an almost invisible layer of air separating her skin from touching the concrete building. "What an embarrassment" she would say looking at me in this instant, to allow my body to touch grey dust, to allow myself to look like this. She doesn't see it like me, she doesn't see dust, she sees numbers, numbers everywhere and all the time, if I didn't know better I'd say the numbers follow her home and crawl in through her ear, haunting her at night like little green monsters that just keep screaming, tiny voices that won't shut up.

But Stella doesn't have demons, she has fairies in her head and a little mouse in her stomach, they're the ones who set the rules for her, they know what's best. "It's a choice" she would say "And I chose my own happiness over everybody else's, I know what I need, nobody can tell me otherwise", sometimes I wish she would've chosen a different happiness because looking at her is painful.

My stomach turns, my heart pounds, the green goblins start building another layer of armour inside of me. I sneak into my bedroom through the window again, it smells sweet, sickly sweet, like vanilla and strawberries, it smells like her. You can't see it but I can, Stella is everywhere, it's like her tiny hands split into a million pieces just to hold on to as many things in my room as she could.

Sometimes I'm at school and I can honestly feel her nails clinging to my rib cage, but it's just dust.