A letter to a pile of bones.
I'm still looking for a way to put you back together.
It's not a matter of which piece belongs where, or the number of degrees your ring finger should be facing to the right (the one you broke catching your finger in your dad's pocket knife when you were thirteen and more than a little stupid). See, I know the way you're supposed to work-the way your bones grind uncomfortably beneath your kneecaps, the chip in your collarbone that never properly healed. I just can't work with the constant tick tock, tick tock you whisper from across the kitchen table.
Time is running out.
Shut up.
Tell me why you're still trying?
I'm in love with you, asshole.
Sometimes you kiss my forehead with a tenderness that resembles your runaway father and I'm afraid the body laid out in front of me is beginning to rot. I may be able to stack your vertebrae into a perfect column and slide your scapula back into place, but I will never recreate the colour of green staring at me from the opposite end of the mattress. We are the sun and the moon and you have always been stronger, burned brighter, loved fiercer. Now you watch me pick at the skin around my fingernails and I wonder if this is the best I can do.
The illusion of you is driving me mad.
Still love me, do you?
Always.
But I'd rather be positively insane than absolutely alone.
