i. You want to tell them you’re surrounded by ghosts, not like the one in the room across the hall but the ones who crawl inside your throat and stay there, handpicking your words like tart berries and tossing them from between your juice-stained lips.
ii. Your brothers smell like fast cars and asphalt, rage and danger and shadows and something like want, like desperation so potent it could engulf the world in flames. And what do you smell like? Cologne and lead pencils and a distant longing for a box of matches, just to prove to yourself that you, too, are capable of burning.
iii. She smiles at you and you want to sew it to the inside of your wrist, so she can taste it every time your pulse quickens.
iv. You are crisp and clean, you learned to say yes, ma'am before you knew how to call for your own mother. The branches of your family tree tear at your eyes, its vines wrap around your aching throat. This is all you know of a mother’s embrace.
v. You are reckless and wild, something kept you alive and you feel it pulsing through you every second, sometimes it is louder than your own heartbeat. You want to say thank you but the only words that come out are i’m sorry, i’m sorry.
vi. Rip out a page from your notebook and upon it, squeeze the blood from your swelling heart. Give them something they can use, for once, understand that your words mean nothing.
vii. There is a target on your back and you don’t even know it yet, but you feel it. You feel it and it burns, it aches, and you are so tired of waiting. hit me, you think, just hit me already.