This morning I woke up and thought I'd died.
Dreams of deaths by strangulation, by suffocation.
It took longer than usual.
I checked the mirror.
I looked alive,
but my irises were floating in an eye of blood.
"Think of it like a bruise," my brother told me,
because bruise doesn't mean broken,
just like blood doesn't mean blind--
but it is true
that what blooms on the surface
is a warning of what's looming underneath--
I kept thinking of my own death.
It's one of those things
that if you think about too long
you'll throw up.
You'll make yourself sick over it,
like thinking of what infinity means,
or the parts that make up the parts of atoms.
How many times have you escaped death?
How many times have you woken up alive
only to remember that the night before
you were strangling yourself
between flushes
in a bathroom stall in a crowded nightclub
willing to do anything
to get rid of your hiccups?
...
(k)
