Russell Justwrite 1

The color of fading, like how I don't fit in my mother's arms anymore and I imagine her with grey hair sometimes, eyes like raindrops on the dirty window of our car, wondering why there's traffic on a day when everyone feels like staying in bed. I fold blankets to elevate your feet, imagine the swollen ankles of a pregnant woman, the hollow bones of my grandmother, aching when the clouds come in. I have a scar on the top of my right hand that hurts sometimes, but I haven't learned to use it to predict the weather. Sometimes the internet tells me it's snowing before I've opened my curtains for the day, shadows caught in the fabric folds like jail bars that can't be broken, with lace in between so thin it is a spiderweb, sticking itself to my memories so all I feel on my fingertips are the tingling ghosts of tiny footsteps, eight at a time, reminding me that I don't have a compass and the north star looks like all the others, fades before my campfire, hides behind my smoke signals so I have no light to read them. My skin feels like smoke sometimes, my stomach like steam, a raindrop rising again from the asphalt, my atoms repelled by each other, refusing to let me shrink.