Go On

Late night in Brooklyn Heights, the streets are black, the subway platform is being cleaned with a pressure washer, it's a stark contrast, or a metaphor, you can't be sure. I turned around halfway down the street to look at the window, to look at the light, to look at an entire life that fell from between my fingers, what use is there in remembering now. I threw out the old mattress, I cleaned out my closet, the room looks so empty suddenly. I ran my fingers over things I once knew, over things that felt like home though they weren't mine, I have been homeless for so long I didn't know it could feel like that, and now it doesn't again. I believe in all the good things to come; it's just so hard not to feel like I'm at the poker table with all my jewels being swept away from me. It's just hard not to feel like I had the Great Pearl and now am left with only the grain of sand once more. I turn it over in my hand, try to tell myself that I am not the diver but the oyster itself. I am not the wave but the entire fucking ocean.

It's just some days I am no wave, no ocean, no oyster. Some days I am only human, tattered at the seams and frail and soft and losing, losing, losing. Some days I live a script entirely foreign, it wasn't the part I'd asked for, these lines don't feel right on my lips.

But the script is mine now. And a pearl means nothing still in its shell.