i.

        i am cold.

(she says i'm not real, but she is why i'm here.)

there are many solar systems i've drifted through to come here, sifted through fingernails like cloud wombs and sea paint, searching for the heart that nobody seems to want.

i thought i'd had my heart all along, but my hopes seemed to feather along my cheeks like fallen eyelashes. one day, she taught me that i could open myself up, peel my ribs apart like the opening to a birdcage, and find myself empty, no tissue, no heart, nothing to touch. i was a bird skeleton, wings folded in her mouth so that everytime i'd try to fly, she'd bite.

fairy tales collected at my feet like dead flowers and bits of paper collected underneath the carpet. i was going to show her that my feelings existed. that my smile wasn't polish rolling to the sides in smears of pink, that my eyes weren't a mess of ocean and angel hair and puppetry. i wasn't strings. i wasn't love that is said so many times, but never meant.

the stories never told me what my heart would look like, but i pictured it the size of my hands cupped around it, formed from collecting bits of gelatin, bits of glitter that the stars had shaken from their coats, tapered with the words i could never bring myself to say. when i found my heart, nesting at the bottom of my bedsheets, sticking to my feet and melding to my skin from being trampled, i would be complete.

i would be valuable.


ii.

        i am warm.

(she says i'm fake, but all her universes are dry mascara, shadows evaporating to dust.)

i'm not her little girl, she makes that clear. i don't belong to anyone.

she talks of all the others as if they are the comets you could catch in your hand, the jewels that find inside your body, and have to pull out, all streaked in memory and blood. they belong to someone, she says. you don't belong to anyone. and i'm not ever to hurt them, she warns. my lungs grow cramped, and i crawl into my bed, remembering the somatic threads upon my legs and collarbones.

i like to dream of being happy, and i don't mean the happy in scribbling false hearts and the happy in being embedded in skin and plastic. i mean the happy where the sun looks silver and dusted in snow, cool upon my back and melting my bones. but i am in safe arms, for i belong to someone, and they belong to me. they'd never hurt me.

but i'm convinced that the hardest thing to ever be is truly happy; the winter never stays, the summer always goes. no one ever wants to see you making kites, flying your soul from a string, because it might just remind them that their kite broke long ago. sometimes, we hurt so much inside, a little more everyday, that you just become dead to the world. i'm sure that every moment, she is in my heart, smiling a little and waiting for my insides to wedge themselves out.

she built me up on strawberry and dark hair and pale melanin eyes, so that I could somehow get caught up in her exoskeleton, the hard eggshell and toast exterior that chips away as time goes on. Sometimes it cuts into my skin, so that i get trapped underneath.

it's impossible to be free when you're tangled up in several different kites.


iii.

    i am not real.

(she says i'm not real, i'm cold, i'm warm, i don't exist.)

people are like butterflies, she says.

when you need to, when you want to, you can take them by their paraffin and glitter wings, pull them apart. it all feels so good, she instructs. i shake my head, disagree, try and hold it in. i search for what went wrong, all the pieces that are so small they never fit.

sometimes, you can see it in her eyes.

she thinks we're human butterflies.