I just wish you didn’t feel the need
You are mostly silent but when you do speak you take that tone with me.
My bones break easily. You see me as fragile, watch where I walk, wrap my ankles in cotton when it rains. The doctor pulls my bones apart, bends my wrist back, pushes in a way that will allow it to heal in four to six weeks. You hold your arm where mine is broken.
I don’t know what time you get off work and I slept on your couch as your plants died. I don’t take my pills at the same time every day and sometimes I don’t take them at all. You are always telling me things for the hundredth time, taking that tone with me.
I dream almost every night. People speak in languages I can’t understand and the brakes go out in my car.
But then you wake in the middle of the night knowing that in the morning they’ll find my body washed up on the shore of Sausalito.
I think in numbers. I count and multiply until my brain is a controlled thing that won’t go jumping off a bridge. But your voice when you say this is something I feel.