Built for Desire, Unfit for Reality

They imagine me in fragments- a mouth without a voice, eyes emptied of history, a body pared down to surfaces.

They linger longest on what shines and glows that can be stripped of weight. They focus on what can be smoothed until it no longer resists and names it lovely.

In their sleep, I am pliable, a soft hallucination that never asks, never resists, never remembers. They dress me in their wanting and call it desire. They replace my pulse with projection, my breath with expectation, until I am light enough to be carried without a single care.

I stand very still in their fantasies, like a museum piece mislabeled alive. They stare and state until looking forgets how to stop.

"You are beautiful the way quiet moments feel like promises."

The real me disrupts the dream- she bleeds into the edges, she cracks the glass and refuses the script. So they return me to their imagination, where women don't age, don't bruise and don't leave.

There I will remain perfectly preserved but never truly seen.

Never known at all.