{Pineapple}

You’d ask to be touched with love, but that’s too easy. Impact is not the scratch to and fro of spilt sugar on bare thighs. It is not the friction of a 12 year old girl against a kitchen bench. A scratch is a different form of impact altogether. A scratch is fleeting, a bitten fingertip.

It’s not because you want to die; it's because you can’t live. Because you look a little too much like your mother? It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. You know that immediately. But if you hadn’t, you’d still be living dead. When it’s just you and the world, it’s on your terms. You want to think of yourself, and only yourself.

Are you selfish? Yes.

You look like your mother. You casually mention pineapple, and your sudden craving for them. Hospital food, right?

You don’t sleep, instead you lie awake and cry; waiting to live or waiting to die because they won't tell you which. You can rock, cry to yourself; but you believe you don’t deserve it. So you rock anyway, and cry, and hate your skin. These hospital corridors never sleep but just buzz with an unnatural schedule. You haven’t slept much at all. You’re feeling more alone than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. No-one stayed. That’s fine by you. (Except that you’re a liar.) Nothing will help, and just like a rape, no-one will talk about it.

A team of trainee doctors gather around your bed as though you're an experiment gone wrong. You hurt yourself because the pain was so bad that you couldn't face living, you mutter. They look at you hoping you'll shut up. You decide that you have nothing to lose. You might as well have a stupid, fun big career, because you feel so dead inside that nothing could get worse.

If you don't get yourself up, no-one is going to help you up.

Nothing in the universe will turn you the right way around again. The walls that pushed you out here were only flesh and blood. Suppose he’s an invert. Perhaps he was trying to understand his own creation that came from these walls he loved {never stopped loving}? Didn’t he once know these walls by heart?

Perhaps he’s jealous of your passage (through her womb, through her image). Is it confusing to see her travel across your face? What if he’s trying to know you inside and out?

In the morning, you’re waiting to be released. A little practiced smiling to a psychologist (she should know better) and they’re contemplating releasing you back into the day. The magical land of those willing; daring; or just too plain ignorant to consider not living.

If you want nothing of the word, then understand that it's very simple to switch and to want everything. Both require you to not care what happens to you. You are not strong, you are not brave, you're just a kamikaze pilot. You went to bed in that hospital wanting nothing, and woke up wanting the whole world.

She’s a survivor, your mother. She’s strong, but no matter how much she flashes in your eyes, that’s just blood, you’re just a chemical reaction that happened in her some years ago. You want to be strong like her, and impenetrable.

She smells like perfume you doubt you’ll ever wear no matter how your tastes may change with age. The scent belongs to her, she smells like a mother and you smell like a sleepless night in a hospital bed. The pink tracksuit she brought you makes your thighs look fat.

She’s brought you pineapple.