cheap gold

She felt like cheap gold.

The kind you find at thrift stores. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

She wished she had diamonds in her teeth and a crown for a soul, so she felt undisposed of.

So, she was the holy grail of finds.

She wished hell wept for her while heaven held her. She wanted to please all things.

She hated crumbling into the back of a taxi with ethanol for a breath, doused in salty tears over the boy who decided her body was his to please himself. She hoped someday magic would heal her rips and tears,

regrow her garden.

But the flowers died anyway.

She felt buried. Suffocated, deserted, and unwatched.

Dead, too.

She felt like apathy.

But,

she became a forest fire. Hard to harness, but free. She burned through the world on her own, straight to its heart.

And found her own in the rubble.

She felt bright.

The way you feel when you win monopoly. She loved going to the fishing town, checking into the motel with a balcony and everyday waking up to freshly brewed coffee,

(though she hated coffee),

to turning in for the night accompanied by buskers with loonies in their cases.

She feels like a breathing ghost.

She walks through her own walls she built with concrete decades ago.

She’s cheap gold though

The real stuff is too breakable.

And she isn’t.