Sometimes I go to sleep because I’m afraid. Sometimes I wake up because I have walls. Walls around me are white, as they typically do, as they should do. I talk to you in the middle of a white chamber, a dungeon with a heart in it. I carry a red death cell at my center. I talk to you because you are my sister with the same bones, my sister killed by the same fairytale. Long ago we would take a walk after supper, without a chain of keys, without a daring mother (you never asked our father’s name or who he was). You laughed so loud, and shrunk into a pair of red shoes. The night has kept dancing in them ever since, and I’ve become as black as my fear. You are reduced to my worst secret acted out on this public stage. And they are pulling me, hands drowned by hands, asking how much is a ticket.
2022.7.19
