I throw a lily on your corpse and bury you.

As I shovel dirt into the hole in which you lay, the flower falls from your chest and onto the earth surrounding you, buried all the same.

You wouldn't have held onto it, even if you were alive.

You thought flowers were impractical and expensive.

But lilies are much more symbolic to me.

I think you would've been proud to see what we'd accomplished when we had received them.

Sadly, I'm not sure I deserved any of it.

I've faked my way through everything I've done since you left.

I don't know when you died, exactly.

I think it was a gradual decline.

I felt you slip away - at first you embraced me tightly, then held my hand, then walked behind me, until I did not feel you at all.

Now I feel like a shadow of what we once were, together.

I kneel down at your grave, press my face into the ground, wishing I lay where you are instead.

You alone would've wanted to live.

Why must I stay?

Without you, I wish I was dead.

I herd sheep

I round them up and they heed my command

But they look at me at eye level

And I feel like I'm one of them

Perhaps my soft fur

Is like the plushness of their wool

And perhaps my strong bays

Sound to them like familiar bleats

And even still

One or another escapes the roundup

I've failed

And I chase but they are taken

I've failed

The predators look like me

I've failed

But they have sharper teeth

I've failed

And coarser fur

I

have

failed

My owners tell me to stay

And I do, day in and day night

Those that do look like me

Invite me to play

But I do not know how

My owners haven't taught me to do so

I don't play

I am a failure

I just herd sheep

Fingertips flit across the strings, palm tapping against the body percussively. I feel the sound, the vibrations, echo from the hollow of the instrument and envelope me, enraptured.

My boyfriend plays his bass and I love it. I scroll through the internet and watch other people play and I love it.

I play mine and I love it.

Then hate it.

Hate myself.

Sudden discord, post-performance static screaming at me through the amplifier. Fingers bitten raw by the strings, deep, past callouses built over obsessive habit.

I mute the sound.

Reach for it again.

I love it. Breaths timed in rhythm and syncopation.

Fuck my life. Fuck me.

Actually I feel great?

I just wanna play forever.

To play forever would be a curse.

10pm, city wide blackouts. My cousins and I would huddle around and make wax people out of candle drippings - apprentices to Madame Tussaud. Sticky heat, sweat and mild body odor. The smell of singed wood from dropping wax on ants. Sepia colored memories dipped in candlelight.

Fireflies used to laugh along with us, but it’s more quiet now. In the background, a dull mechanical thrum that never leaves.

There's no more laughter. My back sticks to the couch in the 40 degree weather - day, afternoon, night. Face bathed in blue light - day, afternoon, night.

Twenty-five.

Initializing systems.

Activating neurons.

Firing synapses.

Processing stored memory.

...

...

Pre-frontal cortex... [OFFLINE]

Re-initiating pre-frontal cortex.

...

...

Pre-frontal cortex... [OFFLINE]

Emergency protocol activated.

Shutting down.

...

...

Scrap metal, obsolete machinery - whirring to life without directive, ERROR shutting down. A loop.

The stench of torment hanging over a landfill of memory. A goldmine decayed into compost.

Its form is similar to a suit of armor - metal, strong, protective. But hollow and without spine.

Twenty-five.

Mechanically, it feels older.

Cognitively, it feels younger.

Both signs of potential impairment.

Oil its joints, bathe its rust in acid.

Reprogram its boundaries.

IF boundary protocol broken = YES, 

     EXECUTE: "NO"

...

Command received.

...

Execution failed.

...

Shutting down.

Initializing systems.

Shutting down.
     
Initializing systems.

Perhaps it’s broken.

An echo of my old self.

Why must I compare?

I was forged in different realms, different planes. Harsher, more livid. Where anger brought peace and suffering meant sacrifice. Held in place by the chains of deprivation - a poverty of wealth, love, and time. Do I deem the restraints broken? Or have I merely learned to walk in place?

They come to me like locusts in a plague. They sting and my throat closes, chest heaving and choking, I hallucinate coughing up blood. My therapist calls them “automatic thoughts”.

And so I imagine my neurons wiring themselves together - forming a ticking time bomb waiting to erupt from my skull on their whim. Or a hitman with a gun, waiting from the rooftops for me to step outside and try to breathe some clean air for once.

”Argue against them,” she says. But God knows how much I debate. It seems in self-argument you are either always wrong or always right. At a standoff with the better and worse parts of yourself. And yet in radical self-acceptance you validate both points of view and here you stand, immobilized.

Inhale, exhale.

Write your worries on the leaf.

Inhale, exhale exhale exhale.

Watch the leaf float down the stream.

Inhale, exhale exhale exhale exhale.

And the leaf disappears in the distance -

What did I write on it again?