Tuesday 25 March 2014

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

1 comment:

  1. It is amazing how adolescence seems so long but so short when you look back :)

    ReplyDelete