these are the things that you know

in the small hours of the night, you are afraid for no reason. you were sick and he was ibuprofen. you spent half of your life with a dormant volcano mouth and now you are crushing ice between your teeth so you are quietly fuming. you think of the ways in which your limbs could detangle from his as your mind races to the next collapse. you are stagnant and still you sink. you walk barefoot around him waiting to feel shards of eggshells puncture the sole. your sock is a bloody rag clutched between canines. you are sitting on a stranger’s couch picking at the frayed hems of your nail bed until you draw enough blood. you are not one to say no to a good time. instead, you think it softly and grow cold and brittle. your fingers curl into a fist that rests on your lap like a hernia minutes away from The Rupture. you tear and draw until your skin splinters like pomegranate. you are kneeling at the altar of a Broken Dream. the mirror shattered into stars and the dust is your soul under a bootheel. there is a car on the curb that has your blood wrapped around the steering wheel. you bury the keys in nearby dirt and crawl towards the dirtiest thing you know. in the hotel bathroom, you are throwing up a chartreuse spewing “sorry for staining your shoes.” you were sick, and he made you sicker. there is vomit on his shoelaces. you must sit with lament. the getaway has your dna. you must sit with lament. in the small hours of the night, you are tasting gravel shovelling to find something good. you are afraid for many reasons.

***

Asra Jafarey is in their final year of university at LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan, majoring in English. They started writing because this one person came up to them when they were 16 and said they looked like someone who writes. They still don’t know what that means, but hey - they’re here now.