Breadcrumb #84

ANNA PICAGLI

What is gone? 

Everything but a small room full of clothes I have worn threadbare, a scattering of paper on which I cannot write, and a pair of tweezers, dull from obsession.

When was the last time you were happy at all?

When your head was in my lap and my hands were in your hair and I had no idea that I’d never touch you again. Before the whole world shrank into a padded room of impossible. Before everything I loved turned to dust and blew so far away it was forever out of my reach. Before the proud compass of my heart forgot how to do anything but spin wildly. Before the only “route” laid before me was the one in “routine.” When words used to form at the base of my dry throat and drag themselves upwards, wild and wet and useful. When awake was better than dreaming so I didn’t need to sleep. There was a sharpness to my mind I cannot get back, a razor-edged memory that has softened to pulp. A miracle now is finding the house keys, dressing for the weather, keeping a meal down. There is an endless war between me and bile in my stomach, the oil in my skin, my too-tight joints. 

What is the lullaby that soothes you to sleep?

That dense, soaked sand at the edge of the ocean. I loved a boy once with hair that exact color. He was made of a terrible magic: caught all my shots in the dark like bullets in the teeth and then vanished. I evening-dream of long, white skirts blowing against my ankles. I dream of walking into the drowning room until there is nothing but depth.

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