Happy Birthday

Our skin is born anew every week. Seven days. We think nothing of the healing cuts fresh against our pale skin; you think nothing of the faint bruise in the cradle of your elbow, where your veins shuddered beneath syringes and apathy.

Our bodies tremble in the presence of our recklessness and in a week, a mottled purple bruise can be nothing but a crescent moon of yellow, hardly noticeable to anyone unless they’re really looking for it. We’re born fresh; we are forgiven, given second chances in our undeserving hands.

It takes seven days for your hands to forget the map of my curves. It takes seven days for the memory of my lips to fade from yours.

In seven days, the roadways of your veins will have never throbbed in anticipation because of my breathing against your collarbone. All it takes is seven days for your body to heave a great sigh of relief and leave me behind, as if you knew that I was never really yours to keep.

If only we could train our minds in such a way that I could erase the sound of your laughter from my brain’s inevitable relay. If only we could train our hearts not to expect such a feeling again; it only takes one week for you to transform yourself into a new kind of creature, one that has never known hurt, or pain, or the reckless mania of loving a girl with a crooked smile, glassy eyes and a shotgun heart.

Seven days. Seven days from now, my body will have never spoken these words. I will exist in a body that has never touched you.

I will exist in a body that has never pressed itself against yours, desperate to keep the broken pieces of you whole. In seven days, it will be clean. It will breathe relief and wake up without staining the bedsheets with guilt.

My body will never again know what it is like to burn; it will never again know the journey of trying to hold water in its bare hands.