In The Event This Doesn't Fall Apart

by Shannon Lee Barry

“Please stop that,” I say, and it is the first and only time I lie to you. Please don’t ever stop. I want to be looked at by you until the sun goes down.

It is you and the words you say to me, how I am the kind of pretty that shakes the ground when I walk into a room. How you have trouble making eye contact. And it is me, trying to fight the smile I feel building when I read and reread them. I told myself to feel nothing at all.

I am afraid. I am, I am, That nothing this good can last.

You are waiting on the edge of my mind every morning when I wake up, ready to be thought about. You are never far from me.

And it was your pain I was focused on— I can’t believe you’re choosing to think of me at all.

Sometimes I think I made you up inside my head. Sometimes I think I spent so long hoping for someone like you that I willed you into my life.

At the tip of all my memories here is my loneliness, from a girl who wished to never be alone.