When I was smaller, my mother washed my hair for me
and the way her fingers rested on my wet scalp

still burns the way it did. My body misses her like

I've tied my heart to a string she's pulling on right now, quick knocks
on a door inside a house no one's living in.

Her voice echos throughout the corridors, and the only words I can hear her say
are the words I and you. I press my palm my wrists my elbows
chest heart and body

against the wall you like to call reason.

That same thing ties my arms behind my back and submerses me
inside a bathtub — the water pink

like before.

It wants to burn me with the same burning she could give — that lightness
a sin — like lips that leave spaces between two people in love,

but no fire was a gentleness.

It couldn't reenact a scene it hadn't touch, or form incompleteness with just a purposeful empty room
like a camera rotating from left to right to the part she tells me where

she saw my father
and where she learnt to keep her pills

the first night they kissed.