Nafeeza Kayla Pualiyan

almost Nafeeza Kayla Pualiyan i see things other people leave alone. in you, this meant eyes red with sleep, though guilt uses the same dye, a silence that never slouched, the suggestion of depth. i put my hand inside that suggestion and found potential, which is what hope calls a pulse it cannot prove. you were good at almost. you could sleep inside the final mile of any journey and call yourself lost. i cried for the distance. it was embarrassingly small. you said you were brave. i imagined a bird excellent at sums, measuring the branch, the wind, the probable sky, then waiting. your mother tied a bib at your throat. the wind lifted it behind you and i called it a cape. it was still there to catch the mess. she made you sensitive, which is not the same as kind. you could feel every weather inside your body and none of the damage outside it. i kept waiting for you to become what i had already described. in the end, the cloth stayed where it was tied.