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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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![]() [content warning: toxic relationships, substance abuse] in the backseat of a stranger’s honda, the cigarette stain on my wrist still shines like alabaster. i am laced into my white dress from junior prom, but i have a feeling we graduated years ago. by midnight we are ambitions
in freefall, bone-picking crows in virginia mid-winter, not swans sunk in the lake. the bomb-black of your tuxedo has faded to gray. the plans we made to break of this glassy-eyed town, before the engine was overrun by moss & spring. don’t know much, but this i know: i’ve written my will. etched it into the walls of a sequoia & sealed it with a sailer’s kiss. left what little i have to you. we still call ourselves lucky, but i can’t see clearly through the fog in my brain. they say play pretty, not dead— like how romantic. how romanticized. as if we are not shells. as if reinvention is not hollowed limbs & honeyed tongues & i haven’t tasted for half a decade. but i taste metallic when i bleed. cyclic-- there is a blade & a carton of eggs past sell-by date in the trunk. i slash a tire for every extra day in purgatory & set the sidewalk for a picnic. i won’t tell you anything because the moon is sickle-shaped over an empty parking lot & you still gaze at all the pretty virgin girls in the magazines. we don’t care that our world is a wasteland. your artificiality sticky as candyfloss on my bare skin. my desperation saccharine-sweet like morphine. the cheap alcohol on your breath spills over me like the contents of a stoppered vial, all the things we could have been. play pretty, but they only care when you’re dead. the engine is clean now—but we haven’t been for days. in a few centuries, an archaeologist or maybe a schoolgirl will find my cranium eroded in a bone-beaten alley, copper & soot picked clean by crows, the ghosts of your fingerprints ribboning my throat. i will be splayed on the turrets of your white-picket-fence fantasies—into infinity, the ugly duckling that never turned into a swan. Comments are closed.
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Unless otherwise noted, all pictures used are open-source images in the public domain. Archives
September 2023
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