Sometimes I think about what it is to stay behind when everyone else has walked on. Because I think for most of my life I have felt like I am waiting in the town of cats, where the train keeps passing by but never stops, as though someone missed telling me that I should have boarded it years ago, and now it’s too late.
My soul carries stories long gone, of all the people that I have known, and places I have never been. They beat against my chest, sporadically, sometimes too fast, sometimes stopping for a fraction of a second — the testimony of a heart that is wearing itself thin trying to keep me alive.
I don’t know where I stand, whether I have any right to burrow myself into the narrative of others. There have been times I have felt the stark constant of un-belonging. Other times the needs of others feel like a weight upon my bones, dragging me beneath the earth, and I wish then that I was mere vapour, a breath in the morning mist.
That is contradictory, perhaps, but I can’t seem to make up my mind where I want to be. It seems I have always had one foot sliding into shadow, while the other desperately digs its heels into the earth, hoping its realness is enough to hold me fast.
Once, you traced the atlas of my scars and kissed them from my wrist to elbow. You told me I was beautiful.
But when I look at them now, I realise I don’t wish to be beautiful.
I just want to be whole.
