You are busy.
Preparing for something, waiting for something, getting somewhere.
I place the most selfless thing that I have made for myself scribbled on the back of a workshopped poem. It is a love letter addressed to myself, signed from myself. It is unsealed and vulnerable. It is hastily written in pen from a conference where I had to pretend to be someone. It is the rawest thing that I had ever known.
For the first time in a long while, I ate well. There is a Starbucks in the corner that I visit in early mornings and late afternoons; yesterday, my emptiness echoed into a lecture hall, and then a library, and then the guards checking my bag as I stretched back to my dorm. My nightly fixation is how the drone of my stomach is equivalent to a bomb: that is, it is atomic and resonant and pierces everyone’s ears, that is, it is likely disregarded and forgotten by everyone else in history but the people it has directly inflicted, that is, I exaggerate and wince at the thought of me clutching a stomach fueled for days on cereal every other day and a bag of kale chips that one time.
Last night was different, though. I waste twenty more dollars. I wash all my bowls and utensils for no reason and unseal the others while discarding the sushi containers. I clean my room and study for a test I am unsure I will take. When I put things inside of myself to make sure that the body is still there, I am sure that one day I will feel it when it is freed.
There is a dream where I lay in bed and I watch her knees on the ground with the growing lacerations and scraping at the neck.
I take care of this image. I become her.
I become everything I ever wanted to be.