Folk Songs and Cinnamon Eyes

Her skin is porcelain. Her veins paint their china ink across her chest. Her nails sometimes bend a little too much. They’re a little too tenuous, the way a feather’s graze can split them in two. 

Her hazel hair lies in wisps and sits in its knotted cumuli. 

We whisper to each other sometimes. A hushed breath. Words hidden behind a frigid gust. 

She’s as righteous as they come. Valiant and inexplicably kind, a sort of warm fuzzy kindness that I want to be too. I wonder if I can taste colors like she does. 

She tells me I'm a rich amber, but I don’t think a boy too obsessed with his own insecurities can be such a pretty hue. 

Her stomach sinks its canines into itself. A constant hum. But sometimes that hum turned into a screech, a brief moment too similar to eternity. Fangs who shred and tear worse than hell could ever. She keeps herself caged, locked deep within pitch black caverns; locked behind door after door. I imagine it’s lonely down there, among the heaps and valleys of drowned carcasses of her thoughts. I told her that she shouldn’t tuck them away. Maybe then she wouldn’t be a thousand miles from reality. 

Once, I told her that nothing is worse than death. That I’d rather suffer eternal pain, as if I could know eternal pain, like I could ever brush my fingers across what she has to feel. She told me a year later that it had split open a freshly sown wound, spilt blood that I never realized was spilt. I can’t say I cared too much either back then.

I think I care too much now. We’re more intertwined than either of us have ever been with anyone. But I wonder if it might be because I heard that her 90 could be shrunk to 48, and that her porcelain skin, chronic pain, pinched nose, could mean she’s one in ten thousand. That chasm will deepen, maybe make a pit inescapably deep. 

I don’t think I should tell her. 

I don’t think I can.

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