Eggshells

From a mouthful of this morning’s eggs, I pull bits of char from yesterday’s breakfast. ‘I had no chance to scrub the pan’, I plea with myself- But I still smash it over my skull like a cartoon. Every morning I wake up feeling last night’s feelings, thinking last night’s thoughts, about what’s happening 10 years ago, and what happened tomorrow. If you add up every simultaneous suffocating moment I fight through- just to say: ‘i love you’ It would stretch for longer than I’ve known you, which is longer than I’ve been alive. There was no ‘today’ in my broken egg. No difference between coming or going, to an automaton in purgatory who saw life through the pinhole eyes of a cardboard mask won at a birthday party I never asked for. The sky looked like the ceiling of a small, dark closet. and flowers looked like plastic bargain bin decor coated in lead paint, the kind left on roadside graves. I used to count those as a child, on the way to destinations I still dread my arrival to. If I were brave enough to show you my awe and my terror of loving the one who revealed the world as something real, all this time- I would sink face down in dirty bathwater choking on wet, laughing sobs until my fingerprints wrinkled away and tear at my clammy skin until my soft nails bent backward and paint red bruises all over my trembling body that would spell out a primitive language neither of us had the chance to learn. This is my best guess: ‘i am just a bad thing that happened a book of false memories and blind feelings. You are a very fast reader, You’ll soon reach the end of me.’ I remember drawing a map in crayon of every ditch I saw myself lying in strange, unnatural positions. Like I'd been struck by a car, and someone shoved my body away so I wouldn’t mess up the next one.