you at sixteen

I find myself thumbing through the ghosts of you

And all your had beens and almosts

Until my mind is numb at one a.m. 

You will always be a half-finished masterpiece to me

For I cannot understand the lines sketched across your skin

Without having witnessed your preliminary drawings

When your canvas was washed

Clean

Vices piled up around you like cigarette butts and you

At sixteen

Your eyes burned red 

I try to imagine you

Halved

Prior to your emergence from your chrysalis

I fail

For suffering feels unnatural on you

Foreign

Alien

I know you must think the same of me

Me

At fourteen

A girl you will never meet

Perhaps we are all half-people

Snippets, cut off at each end

Our pasts a vague and distant mimicry 

Of our present selves

An echoing of gulls against jagged cliffs

Our futures memories of tomorrow

Pretty in how we imagine ourselves to be

Picturing you at sixteen is futile

As attempting to return to fourteen year old me

I must see you for all your half-finished beauty

My eyes awash in your effervescent shades of topaz

Without searching for the scratched out graphite beneath

You at sixteen died with all those birthdays

And it is enough to be in these parentheses

To know you now

You at eighteen