Snow Globe

I need to sleep. For now I lie awake in a makeshift reality that’s made up of reincarnated memories of a life once led by a girl, who tried -but failed- to hold rays of sunlight in between her fingers. 

Through her eyes I see words crisscrossing in the air as they flee the lips of strangers, lovers, comrades, allies; some of them bind to my skin like blood, others course through the nicks of time like water. Every day I pick up a transmission of signals from her past forming meticulous shapes of the earth and the sea. In this body, I move in directions predetermined by her specter. In her body, I feel her phantom spine coiling around my heart. 

I need to sleep to relieve her grip. My eyes close but just as I’m about to turn the knob and swallow the key and roll up my socks and jump over the gate my mind runs wild

so night
after night
after night
I dance with her ghost in dimly lit dreams.

Do you ever wonder how I would have turned out had I not been sheathed in her meat and bones?