Thirteen

I found her as a whispered line in an editorial stuck on the silk folds of a silver jubilee like regret. She had bled once in a different continent A red thread pulled taut at thirteen Doctors sealed the loom forever. I was thirteen too, still learning the topography of my brown skin. My hands trembled like birdcage doors unsure whether to open or close. The article was a medical moonspeak which orbited her wound like gravity. Her body was an eclipse, a shadow swallowing the sun before its rise. Some thresholds are chasms I learned that day shaped like hospital beds, where young girls are unravelled. The editorial has faded like old ink on rain-soaked newsprint, but her sentence lingers. And I am still standing barefoot at the edge, where pain and empathy hold hands like hesitant strangers beneath the doorway called thirteen.