The Partial Bravery of Cowards

In a world she doesn't live in anymore. There's still weather without her. Comedy and drama. People living as though she was never there.

She writes to the person she isn't anymore. Long letters on the other side of the paper she'd saved from the life she had before. Red ink slips its veins deep into the white. She remembers. In buckets of skin. Soured away from the bone. In fits of love more experiment than promise. She tells the glass to wait. She's not ready to be seen again.

She's still too ugly. To look out.

Louder than her solitude. Quieter than her fear. Small blankets on big beds plow through the moments. In words her fingers tell her to say. In eulogies she's always imagined would be hers, not theirs.

She was never alone until someone else was there. Then gone. Her thought process a three-legged dog on stilts dancing the mambo with its clothes on the floor. She was no one. She was nothing. But it never bothered her at all. Until the window went both ways.