My Cardboard Balcony

I Still Love You by Belinda Roddie The turmoil comes in snaps and bursts, almost as if the winter chill is preparing to make the pipes in your brain explode, the inner cerebral plumbing threatening to spill everything - truths, lies, choices, reluctances. You never wanted her to know your doubts, but she knows them. She sees how simply you've tattooed them as a sleeve on your pulsing flesh. Sees the ripples producing sounds along your body. It's white noise, the kind that sets your teeth on a war zone border rather than easing the lactic tension in your muscles. It makes each separate hair stand erect and report for duty on the military assembly line, and you will report for duty, sir, even if it kills you by sundown. You want to stitch your lips closed with silver, even while you dwell in a laboratory world where everything is open-ended - everything is revealed on a steel table with just a little bit of dissection, the blade of the silicon scalpel hot...

I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how I got there. I didn't know where I was going or who I was going to meet or even when this was all going to end. But I could say with absolute certainty what my name was. That was one thing I had. And I wouldn't say it out loud in case that was stolen from me, too. I had had enough swiped from my hands over the past few days to make me cautious of every interaction I partook in.