If you’re like me, your body is probably blanketed in stitches.
Sewn so tightly together in invisible setbacks that 
restrain, confine, and muffle your attempts to shift places.

When I was a little girl, my mother handed me a metallic needle and thread. 
“Don’t worry if the stitches are crooked,” she’d say, 
“because overtime, you’ll be as skilled as an embroiderer”.

Like being swept beneath the black cloak of time, 
I, over time, exceeded my expectations in my needlework.
Regardless of how rusty my needle became, 
or how frayed the thread evolved into.

The first row of unparalleled stitches that aligned my ribs was when I was 12.
Two more rows were welcomed alongside it, then four, then ten.
By the end of my High school career, I had been embedded in tiny lines.
Tiny lines that kept me together after picking myself up.
Putting myself back together. Again. And Again.

In sheer fits of frustration and denial,
I had scraped off the stitching to see the badly bruised and hallowed body as a result of the years of indescribable torment that crippled me into the dirt,
Just to see what I would be like without it.

In a sheer form of hopelessness, 
I picked up the fried up fragments that kept me together and started sewing again.
With the same stitching pattern.
Because I didn’t exist without the stitching. 
Because I didn’t want to exist without the stitching.

But then
I heard you laugh, 
and I unraveled, came undone.

And finally, it’s love holding me together,

—Not—-

—-My—-

—-Stitching——.