She’s observing the wreckage from her point of view. Watching crystals of air and smoke melt together and form her breath, clinging to cold that covers the earth. She can still feel his hands on her. Sticky fingertips whispering promises on her skin, covering the freckles spoiling her sharp nogoaway shoulders. He didn’t even have to turn her skeleton key to get access to whimpering breath and aching everywhere. His shirt had been made of cotton and it had been warm because her lips crushed it somehwhat when he clinged to her and made her taste blood and dust and whyareyoudoingthistome-muted-screams. He had also suffocated her in a slow sort of dance she should perhaps maybe but haven’t gotten used to by now. After doing the same dance day after day week after week teenage years after childhood she felt sort of numb in between her ribs. But she could still feel snow on her limbs and sun on her birthmarks, winter turning to spring, fire burning from the inside out and melting past dreams. She liked that feeling because it made her feel like all was well and she was all normal and not only bones dipped in ink pressed on paper with no emotions, no red sticky heart that sometimes was broken and shattered and crushed but glued back together. The cracks were still showing though, like dried out riverbanks in the (her) fall. What she did not want to feel was his sweat drying on her skin, his breath taking up all the space in her ears, his everything taking up all of the space in her insides. Perhaps he was breaking and entering. If it weren’t for the money he left. Bills wrinkled at the middle like the corners of his fiery wanting lusting needing pleading whatever eyes. Bills used by hundreds of people. Like her. She was a never ending 100-dollar-bill. Passed on to the next person, grabbed by soft, damp palms and squeezed hard until he was done, nails digging into the non-existing flesh puzzle of her hips, forming crescents. After marking her she was shipped off to whoever was willing to take her on, pant in the hollow of her throat, 40-something-fat crushing 13-year-old bones and with no female curves to talk about. She’s gotten used to sheets sticking to her back afterwards.

At nighttime, after wiping off the lipstick sticking to her teeth and coal on her eyelashes, she sometimes curls up by herself as dawn’s pale rays show everything to achingly clearly. But what she hates the most is never ever seeing the sky’s promise of life high above; stars. What she does see however are white motel rooms with stains that will not go away, stains of someone else, a past a present a future. You can’t wish upon them, though. But she gave up hoping/wishing a childhood ago anyway. She sometimes looks at those stains as she breathes through her mouth making all the right hollow-sounding noises and wondering if someone else perhaps laid here, aching all over and in-between, wondering ishedoneyetpleasesayheis and trying to buy oxygen from the air that flows in freely from the open window.

The other kind of window, the window to her future shut the day she left kindergarten. He who kicked her out and made her taste asphalt on her sore knees kept the key in his hard-hitting knuckles. She never tries to open the window by force because she doesn’t want to know what’s in it.
It is when she is tasting air crystals blending dry tears and oxygen on her tongue, that she realizes;

She’s the beholder, not so steadfast and true, observing the wreckage that is her future, from her point of view;

She already knows her future is bitter and blue.