Glass Cities on My Skin
Every day I wake into someone else, stitched from scraps I don’t remember choosing.
The self slips, a newborn thing, writhing, wet. Reborn at midnight, reborn again when the sun hits sleepless eyes. Every day I wake into someone else, stitched from scraps I don’t remember choosing, teeth rearranged, a name that doesn’t belong to me. Sometimes I want to stay under, to take the dark and drift sideways, to let the tide go without me, to watch salt crystallize into tiny glass cities on my skin.
I went inward once and called it safety, called it quiet, but it was retreat, fear disguised as a houseplant overwatered in the corners of my chest. Trying meant failing, failing meant being seen, and who says success feels good. Only the suspended breath, after the yes, before the hands reach for the thing you thought was yours, when the body still belongs to itself and hasn’t been eaten.
The early morning delirium of school comes back sometimes, the fog, the blue, the pink, the day before the day broke, my stomach turning itself, wet grass slicing at my ankles, penny-metal in the air before first bell. A soft light that didn’t belong to anyone yet.
I want to be happy for them, the ones who have chosen art, who live inside the shards of their own making, and I am, but my envy is animal, unhousebroken, scraping at the ribs, restless in the bones, watching them take the thing I keep circling, how they rise with the sun and let it blind them into pure sound. The way you were there before it really began. What if I’ve stopped wanting.
My therapist once said this happens, ambition curling in on itself after you touch the thing you thought you wanted, after the company sells, after the million-dollar promise ferments into something sour and alive. The rare possibility blooms, collapses, and shows its underside, damp and teeming, a bolete ravaged by bugs. I think about this marrow-deep, how much hollow I carried home and how it crawled under the wallpaper, how I fed it anyway.
Some nights I can’t look at the desk, the silence hums in the walls, a low vibration behind the teeth. Have I stopped doing the work, stopped showing up, buried the fire myself. Maybe I was waiting for it to rise on its own, to split the walls with heat. The tides keep pulling, pulling back, dragging the floorboards with them. The voice waits under everything, its faith, its refusal, its small offering, vibrating in the pipes. Unrecognized, maybe forever. So what. I polish anyway, the stories, and the stories about myself, day after day, as the paint flakes from the edges, as the center peels into dust.
This big threshold, the one I keep standing on and never crossing, the floor sticky with something unnamed. Think about what you want and go toward it, but the wanting keeps changing shape when I reach for it. A life lived in yes, a life inside boundaries that stretch until they thin and give, holding the water until it slips sideways through the seams. How even the stewed summer trash smells like Go-Gurt sometimes, sharp and sweet and unholy, heat swelling until the air feels edible.
And the newborn self again, tonight, small, soft, unstitching. The sun rising somewhere I can’t see, the moon swallowing herself toward completion, and me suspended between them, the body neither here nor there, built from borrowed light. Every day a threshold. Every day a choice disguised as its opposite. I wake in the middle of it.
Thank you for reading. If this stayed with you, a single 🫧 Lava Drop helps keep the light on.