Edinburgh

From where I sit on the floor, I can see, they think I am still here. They can’t see that I have a secret as big as me. A secret replaces me.

Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it’s the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it’s what adults have, when they forget what it’s like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can’t remember what that feels like

Summer lasts forever, I say.

It won’t, he says.

How would I know that, I say. I don’t know anything

Did you ever notice, I tell Alyssa, shortly before we leave the comet’s company. How tear, as in to cry, and tear, as in to rip or pull, how they’re spelled the same? You could write them and someone reading would not know if you were crying or separating.

You’d know, she tells me. You would know.

Why do you want to die, I ask myself. How else does it stop?

But never loses / the H, which is Heaven, which is the way back

I tell myself, Not even the light should dare to love you

Here I am. Thirteen at last. Someone should kill me now, I think, as I blow out the candles

I want to say, Take me apart. Leave me here for dead