To all the unwritten versions that time has unwoven, your threads hang heavy on my soul.

The city explodes every morning you leave it. On the train you watch the buildings in Harlem catch fire in the glare of the sun. Steel melt like cheap mascara. Fire escapes vanish into asphalt. Bricks undo their jigsaw. Everything around you crumbles like faith. The screams crash through your headphones. You want to come back later, touch the char, read their stories off your hand like newspaper ink. But instead you hope the ground will open up and swallow them whole before they realize they have nowhere to go. In their white noise and toasty air you close your eyes. You go to sleep. There’s nothing you can do anyway.

You are alone in an apartment that is not yours. The walls are white here, like the cabinets and the doors and the sheets of the king sized bed you sleep on the edge of. If you throw your arm over you can rest your whole hand on the cold floor. They are white too, so white that you feel embarrassed by the random abstractions of hair trailing the few places you feel comfortable enough to just be. But you settle on leaving it all there. Because nothing else in the room tells you that anyone really lives here. You open drawers to find them empty, two closets sparsely filled albeit with designer clothes, a white keyboard piano the roommate has to impress girls covered in dust, a balcony with no chairs. You ask why the room is so empty and he tells you he doesn’t have time to decorate. But to you it’s not a matter of decorating. It’s a matter of living.

The day you stop writing is the day a boy tells you he likes that you are grounded. And you aren’t. And you weren’t. But you want to be. You want so badly to be that you lock up the words from before, the words that told the truth of who you are, of what you fear, of all that you want but can never have, you shield them from the eyes that will never even bother to look for them and you pretend that you were never like that. You were always grounded. You think about deleting them until you realize it would be a bit like killing a part of yourself. There was a time where you wouldn’t have hesitated.