Good Enough

Here I am and the sand beneath my soles is a runway I’ll never fly from, but I keep my arms flung wide like the gulls wheeling dizzily above my head, just in case

Here I am in the summertime when I should be sleeping, and there is a song in my ears that makes me understand a bit too well what the teacher means when she says we are made of “matter” — like maybe being born with a glass slipper for a heart isn’t quite the curse I’d been made to believe

Here I am with a lemon square melting on my tongue, and it tastes a lot like what I always though love might, or should, or maybe if I am finally good enough, someday could

Here I am being told to slow down, but the song is a harmony to the wild inside of me and I love letting her lick me clean until I’m left empty and overflowing and wondering why anyone in their right mind would find a metronome to be anything other than a tin cup tap on jailhouse bars

Here I am and he asks me in a way that places an ending heavy in my hands, and he’ll take it back, but only “if” and so I let him call it love when I know it is not and I cry into my poster of John Lennon whose glasses look a whole lot like Harry Potter’s but magic isn’t real anymore

Here I am and my body is breaking but the doctors say I am okay and so I must just not be trying hard enough and how can that be because I am so tired and my light is his love, is a fire, is fading beneath my shaking palms

Here I am and she has a nickname for him like I never did and her letters are far less pretty but far more doting and I am a new sort of sad that moonlights as fury

Here I am and I don’t want to know her name, but she is here, here she is, and he loves her and not me now, and all that truth is on my tongue and it is melting but it does not taste like love today, and maybe, did it ever?

Here I am and his eyes are something holy I’ve forgotten how to pray to and so I stand in my kitchen and make lemon squares alone at midnight, and I beg the bag of sugar to tell me again, slowly this time.