I chipped the paint from an old picnic table.
Something I’d been trying to preserve for a while now.
I smoothed my hand over its damage as I sat picking apart it’s flaws.
Something I often do to objects. But more or less to myself.




I looked down at the sand that now caressed the skin between my toes.
It felt rough yet soft, like the heart I held in my hands last night.
He had bones that I knew so well.
And I had broken every single one of them.




I didn’t know how I felt.
It was summer now. Old brown leaves tried to cover green roots.
But I couldn’t pick them up as I watched them flutter away with the wind.
I wanted to crush them in my hands, watch them crumble like bones.




Watch them ache, yet not say a word.




It was an odd feeling.
Like crushing a butterfly in the palm of your hand, just to watch it die.
Plucking out a stinger from a bee, just to know it has no more protection.
A feeling you often did to me.





I just wished you would have tore out my lungs. It hurt to scream after a while.





I sat at the graveyard a few nights ago.
Wondering what it was like to have everything, then nothing at all.
To win so much in life, to lose it all in the end.
Was it all worth it. Was it all needed.





It was never a question. Because there wouldn’t be an answer.




I remember your face that night.
While your grip around my wrists got much tighter.
Realizing I didn’t need you anymore.
You crumbled like a brown leaf.




The way I wanted you to die inside. Just like how you made me die so many times.





I breathed today. Real air.
Not secluded air that you kept me in for so long.
I couldn’t be your wingless butterfly anymore.
When all I wanted to do was flee.





I knew your bones so well.
And I pinned every one with bee stingers.
Stitching them to your skin with grass thread and sun dried splinters.
You were never worthy of butterfly wings.




You could never understand what it feels like to fly.





I lied on the picnic table, watching careful clouds fill my sunny sky.
It felt like summer, but it would always be fall in my heart.
I could still hear the leaves scraping across my sidewalks.
Where you clawed your trail so many times.







But this time I left my marks. In every single one of your bones.
And I hope you know I’m a mess.
Chipping off picnic table paint.
While tearing wings off butterflies.
A sickness to rip something in half.








Just to feel whole.

If you [Log In] as a member you can discuss this work with others