December 20

I still remember, fervently, the year when I kept my parka zipped to the collar, all through the day. And the walk between buildings; between days, I walked between the eyes and legs of others and no one saw me. Invisible to the naked eye, I was a microbe, orbiting, around the transitory. I remember when she whispered in my near-deaf ear that she was starving herself. They was eating her food, they were growing stronger and meaner and fatter and she was putting safety pins on the hems of her polos and pushing her hair out of her eyes. I guess I had noticed those polos, and the safety pins, and the brand names sewn onto the breast pockets but I never thought to look at the skin underneath, and to see how much was left. You told me facts and woke me up, broke me up. Between pencil sketches of the fantastic, you scribbled in cursive what you always knew as true and what took me one year, from one March to the next, to see. Walking home in the snow, feeling the corners of my world thaw and crack, I was on to something.