Her tiny fingertips tickle your spine as they trace the ever-winding paths of light. The ink her touches leave behind soaks into your skin like vapor into a receding line, leading with a wandering head and a convinced behind. Her ache becomes embedded in the soft whispers of your hair as it tugs and soothes, gripping tightly to any open desire. The curves of your bodies are like bends in wintry trees sitting up on mountain peaks dusted in forgotten snow, treading high above all the unknown. A bulging set of lashes winks in the day and stills by the night as the light of the moon too heavy to continue lays its weight on that which protects her lustful eyes. You can see his breath, the mist of words and tornadoes of pain she longed for along the bone of her arm. The elbow hovers above your bent hip with no reason at all, with no care or knowledge, appreciated experience—it just is. The existence is too much and your heart becomes like her bones: fragile, complex, cumbersome, and bent. It seeps deeply in the air, the want for the wanted that write labels on the roots of her lusciously thick hair as each new life of beauty fostered from harrowing thoughts is strung into webs of deceit and tunnels of nothing that end in everything. The something she looks for is already found but her throbbing temples and dried hands cannot fathom that it will not come, that it already is. She is paradox. She is everything she wishes not to be: sun after rain, fluorescent bulbs and childs' play, angled light that knows its dark way into the floorboards that creak but do not cry. And you are her two-hundred and ninetieth word—the end result. The common cushion of a used stair carpet nor the duality of all destined to be a double-edged sword will soothe the charged mist palpating around her heart. You will be swallowed by her dreams, you will be barred under her words. They will be laughed at and mocked as she searches for pure of art. Her tiny fingertips tickle your ended soul, and wave quietly across the stove as she ignites the metal flame and sets you aside, then reaches through its heat to understand why—to understand your place in her selfish world, to be a goal she will never have, and a world she will lay in half.

Say goodnight and tuck her tight. Do not wish for a new day but the in-between of the end and the beginning, the lustrous incapable where she will lay for the next hours, inescapable. Say goodnight and tuck her with bulky height. No breath will reach the child tonight.