I wasn’t always bundled up in layer after layer like the earth with crust, mantle, and core.  

Crack me open like an egg watch the yolk drip out and you’ll see I, daddy’s girl once upon a time; running up to dad as if it were Christmas morning everyday I saw him come from work. Only now the yolk tells that words are rarely shared between the two of us. Towns and hearts apart that can’t be mended with a simple dinner with the twinkling city lights made to replace the shine in my eyes that has long gone left the building.  

Split open my skull, take a long look at my brain nice and ripe, and I’ll show you constellations of thoughts building up the everything and nothings of the wrinkles and support beams of my mind. Dreams brilliant with peace and nightmares oozing with malice. Take an extra look here and there and you’ll find the worries of a future that seem to lead into a new road that’s all question marks, a vast void spanning mile upon mile in the dome that is my skull, a great sea of ‘what if’ and ‘maybe’s floating around in the neurons that make my brain.  

Take a glance at me in aisle sixteen. Standing in a box with my face on display. Pick me and shake the box I am in. Just maybe you can hear the echoes of the rattling’s of a longing for a place and someone that has yet to come that resigns as a soft ache where my blood pumper lies.  

Strip me bare as I was the day I was born. Let my clothes fall to the wooden floor and take a peek at my skin and all. Here they are, my scars on my back, heart, and brain all from the days of open sleeves and telling the snakes and empty skulled both with sharp fangs of their own all the wrong things only to end up with dreams of wishing for my own heartbeat to cease, and on a shrink’s couch taking daily pills to mend my broken bones.  

Water me and watch me grow day by day. My nicks and scars still carried with me as a passenger as I reach out to finally feel the warmth of the sun I’ve long been denied of.