Imagine. Every inch of you, up to the jut of your hair spreading across the pillow. Every pound of you, down to the jewelry that you keep on always. Weighing down the mattress with your body, but mostly your soul. No, your thoughts. Racing like a rabid dog, aimless and sick, spreading, charging and charring the space between four walls. Everything is touched, everything is.

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The hum of the AC, air travelling from the outside, cycling and cycling and becoming; shimmering toxic once it touches You. It leaks. Into your closet, turning winter sweaters into skeletons. Out from under the door. Down the hallway, it reverently traces an X over the exposed throats of your sleeping parents. It seeps under the bed. Onto Fingernail clippings, stained into mottled jagged peaks with chipped black polish. Discarded, scattered like traps by a starving, desperate hunter. The hair you’ve shed, Brown tipped with red like a rat rattling in a hawk’s beak, or a leaf that fell before it could completely turn. Little bits of skin you’ve shed, pieces of yourself curled up like a pill bug poked. Ghosts of baby spiders suspended, gliding over the ceiling like a fleet, as mindless as the ocean. Pausing above the bed where you are, sliding slowly, suspended from silk strings. Falling.

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Landing. And you feel their legs, echoes of the whispers of your mind, and you feel them everywhere. Melting the metal of the necklace your mother once touched; balancing on the top of your tongue like a spoon of sugar to stop hiccups. Sinking through the mattress springs to settle below. On the fingernails, the hair, the skin. Things that exist in the small-seeming space where monsters go to die as you grow. Where they curl up and comfort themselves, stroking claws over the sore spots on their chests, disturbing the tangled fur over their hearts. Shrinking, along with the dust and the mismatched socks and the parts that people think no longer matter. It’s a place to forget, and you roll off and into it. 

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And it is calm. Like the way life goes sometimes. When, until someone calls your name, it is as if you don’t exist. And you do not have to acknowledge what you can never truly forget: you are always draining away to nothing. But in between those moments, you can rest. The peace of it. Imagine.