For KL, because I have nothing else to offer.

I wonder what parts of myself I'll hide without even thinking. I wonder what I'll conceal and pretend, how much of myself I'll be able to swallow down or push away. I wonder what will slip out and what I'll sell.

I peel skin in layers, shedding whatever part of me I feel is attaching itself permanently. I wonder if you can even find something within me that is me, something solid within the gelatinous pulse that endlessly renews. I'm beginning to fear that there is no skeleton below, nothing hard and solid for you to grasp, nothing immobile to set your heart onto.

I wonder if disappointment will flutter ripe and willful through a heart borne onwards towards treachery. I wait, breathless, for the pale wash over your eyes, for the rush to speak, to cover what you first thought with a kind word.

I tread by an uncertain rhythm towards whatever fate has in mind for me. My heart and hands, endlessly calculating probabilities, the painful geometry of reality. I manage to convince myself that any possible outcome is, in fact, desirable.

I also wonder how much of the hunger for love is the longing for death. Because surely, what else makes me feel both more alive, more vibrant and flush and more dead, more wasted and gnawingly empty than love? Is it licking the grave or giving birth?