By Viviana Sanchez, TIWP Student

She felt that’s where she must stay,
in the stars,
far away,
looking down upon the world with half-closed eyes,
breathing in, drinking up lies.

She was selfish.
Cold.
Hypocritical, judgmental, paranoid.
Hurtful and harmful.
She didn’t want to be.
But do the morning birds mean to wake you?

No and that is the cycle of the universe,
the march of existence, 
pale and shimmering.
She was untouched and untouchable,
not like sunset but like a snake.

Beautiful is simply a lack of knowledge. 
A cat is pretty before it scratches.
An ocean is serene before you drown.
So cliche were her words
and that’s what she hated.
But love is popular for a purpose 
and sarcasm never helped.

Sometimes she got so mad she screamed silently to no one
and curled into a ball on her bedspread.
But of course no one would come
and no savior would transcend from heaven to comfort her
so she’d quickly wiped away the tears
and tell herself she’s dramatic and selfish for not feeling the happinesses
she was prescribed at birth.
Then she’d try not to show her sensitivity and emotional rawness
until her thick skin regrew and she calmed.

Sometimes, when she was going crazy all alone in her head,
she’d buried her face in the pillow and stare into the black.
Sometimes, she was so sad her soul reseeded from the tips of her fingers
to somewhere deep in her head and heart
where it wrapped around her lungs in silvery wire
and made her ache from the inside out. 
And she’d just lay there 
and like the moon, she felt the world go on.

She never understood
how people could purposefully hurt themselves with words
because all she wanted to do when sad
was wrap herself into oblivion and warmth
and never feel pain or guilt.
But nevertheless she persisted.
She was waiting now,
waiting to reach some fiery super nova form
and explode to tiny silver crystals in the sky,
to reach the zenith of humanity and jump,
to extend past monotonous childhood and survive in euphoria.

Something in her was broken, she was sure.
She felt as festering as the night’s black
and as lifeless as the floating sky rock
people gave creative life to.
She was one of those people.
She wanted to be of and from the moon.
She wanted to be something fantasied and romanticized and desolate. 
But instead she lay in bed and thought
about how everything was breaking to pebbles
and she’d open her curtain a sliver to let a beam of light
cut thought her room’s dark
and she’d think about how easy it was to be the moon
and how simple life was if you were distant and observing
and she’d look in the mirror and remember that was her,
shimmering and stunning to others
and bumpy and bombarded and uninhabitable up close,
misunderstood fondly,
overly eager and rejected.

Soon she knew her internal gravity would take over
and gone she would be
sucked away by her own mind
and devoured by crushing hope.
So
she felt that’s where she must stay,
in the stars,
far away