running.
the urgency in my feet talked to the dark for me
that night, i danced barefoot and backwards, giddy and scared, i made the dark talk back
it was saying it understood about leaving. it would tell them i was sorry, tell them it had all been too much for me.
and it understood what i'd never say - i was only sorry i hadn't left sooner.
but really i was dancing to no sound, and the dark would've mocked me for how i'd turned away until i became nothing but a cover story
and lost my life
somewhere in that suitcase i got for backpacking across Europe
or that half-stitched bag i'd tried to make for my mother
a travel brochure read
"postcards are put to shame with the reality of this place"
and my breathe hitched as i wondered about this place
because if darkness is only the absence of light
then why does it seem like so much more; it marks it's prey like a pygmy eagle
and keeps evolving to feed off of the weaker
even after they're gone
if you extracted my soul out by a simple act of chromatography
would you find any colour or just the lack of it?
what if i bled out onto the paper then and was just the lack of a soul
sent here by a glitch
or by some cruel joke of an experiment
to find out about black holes
with more than just darkness -
the death of a star,
remnants compressed close.
not only a scavenger but a serial killer
to anything that dared to be whole
but when you told me you'd stay, you knew
you knew about how badly it had always ended with me, about the peace that wasn't here
you said you weren't deceived and i should ease up my mythmaking of myself
that you could see the star fragments that made me
that was when i felt like running again
because i couldn't bring you to ruin -
i would only pull at the pieces in you and say i told you so, that when you saw starlight in me,
you should've remembered it burns -
but i didn't
i hoped instead, that you remembered when i talked of video games
how in Breath of the Wild, you follow star fragments that fall from the sky,
you follow them because they glowed, wishing they glowed of home
that i did.