I want to help her. She needs me. Burrowing in a hole will not make the world disappear, the majority of it anyhow, exclusive of a select few pieces to which she clings dearly, obsessively, as if these things–broken pieces of jewelry, ash, cookie boxes and wood shavings–were life itself.
She makes me love in a circle: the start lost in the end of caring, hurting and discarding. I give up and then cannot let her go. But she must be severed. She demands it, not so much in words as in self-destruction, persistent non-choices that astound anyone with a will to live. Slow suicide.
And yet, instincts hard as granite kick in, mindless protection that deny her death. The inversions and subterfuge she contorts herself to, no yogi or circus acrobat of the soul could compete.
The darkness under the bridge comforts her, dims the white light of panic, the incessant static of electrified fear. Those who love her may only bear witness, cannot be the net to her fall. She of scissor mind makes it impossible.
And yet, she is my very own hunger artist, living on trapezes, flying from dumpster to dumpster’s refuse treasure. She refuses a hand. She believes she has her own, enough for her. But her hands shake and hold nothing but fairy tales of embroidered delusion.
And though she drives me to pound my head on the wall to relieve the pain of reason, the crisis of choice and chaos and cold winter nights, I love her still.
credit: mentalfloss.com
In the gaze of the other 