wonderfulrachel

this morning, when we woke up, there was nobody else. we had woken long and slow, the sun had risen, as normal as normal, we had missed it but there it was, still, rising, notstill we wondered; was this how Adam and Eve had felt we wondered; fastnotslow, thoughts racing (our minds were not yet in sync, that comes later, hush, i promise) we wondered; then we wandered, then we wondered we weren’t in Eden, we were in London, and nobody was watering the trees anymore. we didn’t know how we knew we were the only ones. we just knew. everything was quiet and so still everything is so quiet and so still was and is, is and was th

i find myself folded, twisted, fingers on my wrist, feeling the steady pulse of 'i am, i am, i am', pen in hand. it's all i can write, page after page of phrase after phrase until it all blurs together. the commas loop and swirl, and the arches of the m's curl like they're kissing. the dots of the i's are missing and to look at it, you'd never know what it used to be.

emily was born blue. there was another baby before her - a boy, she thinks, but her mother slurs whenever she talks about him, and there are no photos. in her mind, emily has called him benjamin, and, when she closes her eyes, she imagines that he is pushing her on a swing. big brother benjamin. emily and benjamin, running around the garden, playing hide and seek, emily always the seeker, benjamin always hiding. emily has seen photos her mother tried to hide from her: emily lying, a cord wrapped round her neck, blue. in the next one, her limbs are a blur and she's choking on her own fluids, but she's alive and screaming. her mother has an e

i. There was an oak tree, a bench, a stream, and a willow. All of these things have no place in this poem, but poetic significance never made sense to me anyway. Let’s say the oak tree is me, and you are the bench, although I think you’d rather be the stream, and I wouldn’t mind trailing branches and whispering leaves. No, I am the oak tree, and there is bound to be something in how I’ve grown from something warm, brown, and wrinkled, cupped in a palm and patted under earth. There’s nothing romantic about being a bench. The stream is better. Let’s say that we’d sit for it, as it drew us always,

"I'm the one they warned you about."

Frankly, this was getting a bit ridiculous. She’d had them for over an hour now, clutched in her suspiciously damp palm, but the only indicator that she’d even tried to open them was a slight loosening of the envelope flap on one side. And that hadn’t ended well.  It wasn’t that she was scared of the results, per say…Just that she would be perfectly happy with never knowing what they were, and continuing her life in blissful ignorance. At least until she went back to school. Come on, she urged herself. Come on. There’s more to me than this, it isn’t the be-all and end-all. This doesn’t define who I am