“you’ve forgotten about the clothes on the floor and the soap scum and mold on the sink and the paint peeling on the bathroom door and the dirty, vomit-stained hallways that lead to doors and more rooms and streets and sidewalks and more houses and people and feelings and heartbreak and broken dreams and birds in cages and unsaved princesses and the moist feeling of pain between your legs when everything is being taken from you and parents with eye-less faces and pills gurgling in your stomach, just ocean, just here, just now, just the bobbing waves and the spirits dancing like playful lights under the surface of the waves, but your breath is out and you come up gasping and red-faced, and remember that you aren’t a whale, you are a little girl who needs so many things, like food and comfort and love, and stitches and staples and surgeries and antidotes and lotions and creams and powders and pills and vitamins and rubberbands and glue and nails and crutches and pins, all of the time, to keep your body and mind from breaking. It is all so fragile and the candle’s gone out, and there isn’t thunder loud enough, and all of the honey tea and weed and cigarettes and strong coffee and cats and sleep in the world won’t cure the sickness. The sea inside of you spills out of your eyes and into the tub like a black poison that consumes you.”

♐-♑ / ♋-♊ / ♓