still a child

You still sit alone at the base of the only willow tree in the city, immersed in the world you’ve never quite learned how to deplete while everyone else hurries by, minds in briefcases and hearts in heels. Only you hold your soul in your hands, eyes shining with delight at the thought that it has remained intact  over all these years.

When your autumn chilled fingers caress the pieces you’ve handed away so naively to people who always shook you off like rust, you knit yourself a scarf with your brows because this winter will be a merciless one. You’ve chipped yourself for every person who has come and sat beside you, under the weeping branches, to watch your fascination with the pacifically exquisite river.

The man with unnaturally warm hands kept a piece of you in the back pocket of his worn jeans, but you’ve never quite learned how to untie the sandbags from your larynx and hold on to the fleeting words that you know will clear away the cobwebs forming in the corners of his eyes. You aren’t certain if he’s lost you in between his travel though.

You left a corner of yourself in the coat’s breast pocket of a boy eleven stars away. Somehow, you always turn away in shame and flood the ravines of his beige cashmere sweater with your salty tears. You’re beautiful when you cry, were the last words you heard him speak. You wonder if he dropped you in the empty rabbit fields and never looked back.

You gifted the morsel of a girl a piece of yourself when she sat beside you and said, your words are louder than the screaming trees. She taught you how to read the bones of the murdered trees you use as paper, but you never realized she would walk into the river after she trampled merrily over your mind. Perhaps you’ve sunk to the bottom of the river with her body or you’re hung beside her in the stars. You’ll never know.

You’ll always sit alone at the base of the willow tree, eyes gazing over the New York skyline and the glimmering river, welcoming anyone who stops for a moment to sit with you. But somehow, you’ll quite never know how to be the selfish child in the playground.