The clouds aren’t for me.

I thought, at some point, that they were, that I could carve a home out of water vapor, but I would only ever melt through. I would crash from the sky, and I would not be the pretty kind of shooting star but just the dying girl on your back porch. You’d open the door to smashed bits of tile and skin and bones, and then you’d put on that disappointed face and take me back home.

But when I was a kid, and maybe sometimes now, I used to jump as high as I could. On trampolines or on swing sets, I’d launch myself into the air and try to stretch my hands far enough to latch on to something. I pleaded to the rain and the snow and the sleet that I could go with it, that something might take me, but it just kept falling and I was getting cold. And I would’ve frozen out there, too, if you hadn’t taken me inside, set me down with an anxious glance and put me into the corner. I can’t be sure you wanted me there, but you always let me stay.

I am not candy. I am not sun, I am not rain, I am not what is good or beautiful or sweet. I am what is left over on your plate when you get up from the table. I am the old t-shirt in the back of your closet you kept even though you wanted to throw it away. I am for back porches and alleyways, not living rooms.

But the only things I’ve ever wanted were the next things I’ve never had. And sometimes still I’ll wake up with my hands bleeding, ceiling shredded by claws that never should have been let inside in the first place.

Previously published in Apotheca Journal