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Shard 1 

“I am my own best friend and my own worst enemy.”

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When I look at her, all I see is fractured glass. 

        Fragments        her   litter        floor   until         is   all       know.

                        of                   my                    she              I

Pieces of the   

girl I once danced with 

girl I once rocked to sleep 

girl I once— 

was. 

I begin to pick up the shards of her

I am not careful,

I want them to cut me 

                             to scar me 

                                           to tarnish the skin

                                                                   she once cared for. 

I toss them away carelessly, 

so carelessly that—

         they clash against each other, breaking more.

There is one piece I can not bear to lump with the others. 

         I see her/me/us standing alone in a park,

                                                lost, 

                                      crying.  

We said, out loud, that we knew the way home. 

W e  d i d n ‘ t 

Why did you have to be so damn independent? 

 

Shard 2 

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All I see is what could’ve been. 

Firsts/lasts/unspoken-I-love-you’s/respect/unwritten-stories/never-seen-before-endings/ happiness

torn out yellowed pages clutter my bedside table. 

I used to envy the girl who drew hearts above her “I’s” without physically cringing. 

 

I tried writing love 

                             letters,

                                          poems,

                                                        stories, 

but the words slipped off the page.

They blended together into a puddle of ink,

the letters unrecognizable to an untrained eye. 

I morph them into sentences as my bed sheets warp into the 

                                                                             shape 

                                                                  of my 

                                                        body. 

I turn the disconnected letters into bedtime stories.

I escape in the curve of them.

I imagine them as the friends I never truly identified as mine. 

I wonder if the words knew how alone I really was?

 

Shard 3

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My mother reads the torn love letter that I didn’t burn in time. 

She tells me it feels like I choked 

on the words

and spat them out unevenly 

onto the page. 

Her heart would simply fail if she knew I addressed the letter to 

myself.