Here and never here

I don’t know where the street began.

My feet are moving—

slow,

or too fast—

light folding and unfolding around me like hands that want to hold,

or strangle.

Shopfront glass ripples.

Not windows.

Not reflection.

Just a skin of light I could split open

if I pressed hard enough.

When I was a child,

I learned to make my body disappear without leaving the room.

Mother’s voice was a whip.

Father’s silence was worse—

it could stretch for days until it weighed more than a fist.

The belt was a language.

The slammed door was a hymn.

And I prayed by biting my own tongue

so the blood would taste like an answer.

Stillness was survival.

Standby mode until someone needed me for blame,

for work,

for hurting.

I learned how to keep my face clean

even when the rest of me bled.

Sometimes I still cut—

not deep—

just enough to see red,

to watch it bead and slide,

to remember that the inside of me is real.

That I’m not only light and shadow and the shape of someone’s absence.

There are hours missing.

Whole days I might have smiled in.

Might have cried.

Might have been kissed or hit or both.

All gone,

like they rotted before I could store them.

Sometimes the in-between is a hallway

lined with shut doors,

each one whispering my name wrong.

I walk it barefoot,

floor cold as a warning,

and every step echoes like it’s being counted by someone else.

Sometimes it’s a shore.

The tide pulling both ways.

My ankles bruise from the force of it,

but I keep standing,

Thinking about the day my she told me "You Cant even do this right." Whsipering in my ear, vile and bitter

After I failed to take my own life

Cheap Vodka and weed, her sweat stained flip flops as she walked on the sterile linolium

until my father told her not to—

not because he really cared-mabye he did?

but because the doctors might hear me choking.

Right now—

a street.

Mid-step.

The air heavy enough to crush my teeth together.

If a hand found my arm and said,

Here you are,

here you’ve always been,

I would nod.

I would not tell them

I’ve been gone for years.

And that some days,

I still want to go further.