The gloves pinch my skin in the best places

The tips of my fingers

Almost covered

With enough space for a secret to slip through

While I try not to breathe

Blow away this evidence

I have worked so hard to collect

And dry-slide into semi-permanence

 

The gym floor rocks with each tread

I can hear how heavy each step I take is

Each thunck reverberating around this abandoned space

Eventually someone comes in

To set up cones for the class that will come to take

My thinking hold

My shoulders tight from holding my book as I walk

Around, around, around

Losing count of the laps that pass beneath the pages

 

The drip–drop of my damp hair on my legs

As my family kneels in the morning

Arming us for the day ahead

With angels

 

­The cold sweetly eats my arms

As the leather engine rumbles under my feet

My sister dragging just a little longer

So the car will be warm when she makes the dash from the door

To where I am waiting

To drive to our early class

Where she will smile

And I will show my stone face

Where someone will break our joke of a façade

Down the middle

Shattering it into what I really feel

Sometimes back onto stone

Or pillows, or hiccups from laughing instead of breathing

The chemical imbalance too much for six in the morning

 

The days when the sun shines during Lunch

And we should drink Vitamin D from the air

Storing it for February when we will eat discount chocolate the 15^th

Without a significant other to share with, the coconut cream sticking to fingers

That no longer slide into gloves

The sugar halting our work in its well-laid trail

 

We are teenagers pretending

For one more year that nothing can overtake us

We will be in control

Always

What we want we can get with hard work

And a piece of cake to our favorites with a wink

Waiting for our destinies to waltz in the door

Dressed to the nines for our lives

The ones in our heads

Where we conquer the problems

And enslave the world to a better purpose

To which it willingly goes

 

Leaders in disguise

Skipping a day for tradition

Under our sweats and hoodies

Our ties and blazers happy to stay hidden

Days fly past with all the blatant innocence

The guilty can hold

Holding out for a day when we will stop

And realize we never should have come

But couldn’t have stayed

The ache that comes with unshed tears of

Hope, Loneliness, Fear of the Future

And the unbidden echo of joys long since past that will stay

In these walls long after we are gone