She keeps seeking sanctuary under the crests of the sun, looking for familiarity — even for the mere sense of it. Sometimes she looks for it in the bosom of her mother, the woman who still smells like clean laundry and oatmeal cereal on a school morning. Only now she’s withering away, little by little because eventually life brings down even god’s strongest women.

She wonders if it’s too late to melt the walls down and break down in front of her mother, but she’s too afraid she won’t be able to pick up the crumbles — like a compact powder that fell because the cat jumped to the desk. She’s afraid she’ll be absorbed by the air, gone to be breathed in by those around her. She’s afraid to look weak, broken, but she never knew why. She never felt like she was kicked down enough to feel this bad. So she bulldozes every good thing that comes her way, to make sense of this giant, crumbling pain that beats in her chest in replacement of a heart.

Sometimes, she looks into the mirror just to see the little girl that she failed. She wishes she can tell that little kid that she can write cursive now, even without prior practice. Sometimes in life, the weirdest things become your muscle memories, even when you don’t try to. Like putting on winged eyeliner, drawing her eyebrows in even though it’s already crowded with hair as it is, writing her thoughts out on paper like it’s a therapist. They all weren’t practiced, some things you become good at because they’re the only way you can make sense of your existence — even if that moment is always fleeting.

She keeps hearing how that sanctuary she yearns for is just inside of her. But everything that goes inside her grows mold and distorts until it disappears, her chest is a graveyard of hands that tried to clutch her as their belongings. If she closes her eyes and thinks about it too much, she can feel graveyards all over her body, in every part someone has ever tried to chastise or own. She’s estranged in her own vessel, so home is never where the heart is.

She seeks until she circles back to the first step and dies over and over again — like groundhog day, except she doesn’t get the girl in the end, she never does. Every effort to like herself is left in vain, there’s always something wrong. If there isn’t, she’ll find it. Seeking flaws in her own reflection has been one of those unpracticed muscle memories; she never chose for it to be slashed onto her skin, but it did anyway.