pulling my insides out and giving them a good lint rolling, saving the paper so i can see all the little things that made me, me this year. i burrowed so deeply into myself these past few months that turning on my desk lamp feels like stepping into real sunlight.

i now this wolven thing, running down the scents of my sixth grade locker, and my oldest sister's favorite shampoo. i this wolven thing, hungry for five years ago, when the world was unraveling before me, the kink in the hose miles ahead.

and i wish life moved a little more like the tides. that i could blink and be hit with what it feels like to take my first steps, or sink into a pool of thirteen.

but now i'm twenty all over, though my left foot is still nine and the roof of my mouth coated with the icing from my first birthday cake. my smile turned twenty, my rigid heart too.

and what is twenty if not a leap of faith? if not closing your eyes to the mist and opening locked doors long closed?

in maybe thirty or three hundred years someone will invent a word that encompasses every kind of forgiveness, and we can finally figure out how to say that we were once broken, yes, but with lithe hands and concentration, we have glued ourselves back together.

but for now, twenty comes with pride and with clean intestines. i am grateful for the misery, i am thankful for the loneliness. i grow in solitude, i abound in mercy.