because justwrite

Gentle ferrets or maybe just one, like the songs I want to have stuck in my head and to the bottom of my shoe. Slap some paper on top so the floot can slip away, teach itself to fly or maybe fall, since it's not as scary if there's nowhere to land. Ice climbs my wrists and tells me when it's time to wake up, wide eyes staring from a wooden trunk, a chest maybe, with a brass lock whose key is somewhere obvious, somewhere I forget to look because you can't lose something in a place you'd expect it to be. I'm waiting to break in half, maybe not my body nor my soul, but my pencil at least, or it will wear away. The chosen path doesn't matter because there will eventually be so many footprints everything will be flat again, the Earth especially, and I'll drop off the edges with starlight tied around my waist, wonder how far it stretches because I already know how fast it moves. Faster than me, faster than my thoughts, wondering if redundancy is really that obvious, but growing bark as I wait for branches, slip my arms inside myself and feel for a lamp because I prefer lamplight over highlights, want darkness confined to shadows as if it is something when really there's just one thing missing. My eyes adjust, or try to, but accept their limitations-- glass closing in, and I forgot how to break it, forgot about waiting until the pressure equalizes, or if that rule even exists outside of water. I know that I don't know, so I reach for red ribbons dangling above my head, the letters I can feel but not read; they feel like warmth, like sunlight at midnight, like music and fur, alive, pulsing against me. I will wake up and there will be an empty box, a quiet river, but for now I have this.