numbers
Location
nobody told you life was worth its weight in numbers. it begins with a month, a day, a year day one of month twelve of year one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-five your two lungs first afforded you oxygen sometime between breakfast and dinner. ten fingers, ten toes two eyes, one snotty nose. no one bothered to count the hairs on your head, not enough time in the day. you probably spoke the First between year zero and one, a two-lettetrd rejection, too familiar in time. you unearthed your first friend in the sea of twenty-four kindergarteners. she was two pigtails and a periwinkle crayon, to be broken in various places. she was the first of one thousand disappointments. you forgot seven teachers by the time you reached ninth grade. your schedule of eight periods became a day of seven-hundred steps backwards. you fell in love three times, each with a flagrance forty times the last. when you arrived at year seventeen, you had harvested two thousand and eleven smiles, unravelled seven hundred laughs, written thirty seven essays. there were six hundred unanswerable questions six hundred too many you wanted to scream every eleven minutes but uttered no cry. it had only taken eight minutes for your soul to finally crawl out of your two-hundred and six bones, your fifty-pound skin. one hundred seventy six tires marched in your funeral procession forty flowers toppled over one casket ten inches of snow six feet under. seventy dirty tissues, eleven people still lingering, thirty pairs of boots. no one bothered to count the tears. not enough time in the day.