the space above my ears.

Hey, I Love You More Than Anything

I'm sprawled across the carpet on my stomach in the office, spinning back the needles on the pocket watch with my index finger.

My head is heavy with words, but I know we do not have the time to recite the history of the bad places and how they all faded to purple.

I carve out my own slice of time itself, shuffling my shoes through the landfill in the white-walled time out room.

No one listens to children.

The sentences die on my tongue and for the rest of the sermon, I must try to sit still and silent in the pews because Aunty said to be quiet in church.

I nod to her silently, biting back tears from the shards of steak knives stabbing at my gums.

I want to tell her that I am not this way on purpose, but I don't dare risk losing my tongue.

So, I keep the razor blades inside my mouth and I will never ask for help.

"I want to be like the storytellers," the little girl with the blonde pigtails said to her mom.

Her mother replied that she could be more than a storyteller, that she could go out far beyond the horizon and make something big.

The child shook her head, no, she was a storyteller.

It was written on the surface of mars.
I want to reach out to her, the little storyteller with the narrator inside her head.

I want to go back before the trapdoors were built.

Somewhere in the midst of my quest for satisfaction, I locked her up in the cellar below the cottage with a door on the outside, but only a lock on the inside.

The ceiling drips and the floor is damp.

It drips and drips and drips until the basement has flooded, all the traces of early bedtimes and chairs in the back of the class carried out by a murky tide.

The fruit peelings fall to the ground and are absorbed into muscle tissue once again.

So distastefully old, this story gets, the one about the heart of gold in a box.

We don't like that character, she is too sad.

Bring back the brunette one with the sparkly eyes.

No, I say, not her.

While I am being blinded by rotten tomatoes, she comes on anyway, looking prettier than the moon, and everyone is content.

The blades in my mouth are back the second she turns toward me, resting her chrysanthemum hands on my birch wood wrists.

I cannot fall into this again, I think, as I kiss her back.

They will be so disappointed in you, I think, as her fingers inch delicately up my spine.

You said you would choose yourself this time, I think, as I continue to choose her over and over again.

The audience is whooping and hollering because yes, this was what they wanted to see.

The apple cider conclusion all wrapped up in ribbon.

There was no conclusion, though.

Her blood had become leaden too soon.

The TV show cranks out fifteen more seasons of the same bullshit until the only ones watching are the ones who want to burn it down.

Rightfully so.

You can boil it all down to this;

"Who do you call at the payphone on the other side of the state when you've given up everything but your skin?"

Or rather,

Would you call anyone at all?