Muscle Memory

An ode to myself

You are a collection of impeccable, elaborate masks, orbiting that tiny frightened thing you call a heart. It rattles in there like a dried pea in a tin can, hollow percussion, the sound of something that has forgotten how to be held.

Your skin feels wrong under my fingers. Wax fruit in a dusty bowl, perfect and red and completely, irredeemably dead. Beautiful the way only useless things can be beautiful.

I keep looking for you underneath all of this. The actual meat, the blood, the soft animal panic of being known. But I peel back one layer and find another, and another beneath that, paint all the way down. Your eyes are a well where someone fell a long time ago and nobody came. Not even you.

You make all the right sounds. You say the dirty words at exactly the right moment, fluent in a language you have never once felt. It is not desire. It is muscle memory. It is a script you have rehearsed so many times the pages have gone soft.

I am holding a mannequin. I have learned to make it shiver. Now I am just waiting, with the patience of the already grieving, for the battery to die.

I'll never lose this pain, never dream of you again.