Manhattan Requiem

She wakes before the sun in a room that smells of yesterday’s rain and unopened mail,

 the silence pressing against her ribs like a too-tight SKIMS body-suit.

 Outside,

the city yawns,

 steel bones stretching,

 sirens already slicing the morning like razors through silk.

She walks.

No destination,

 just motion,

 a ghost in sneakers,

 haunted by the weight of her own breath.

The Brooklyn Bridge looms,

 its cables like veins pulsing with the lives of strangers.

 She imagines the fall,

 a swan dive into oblivion,

 but her mother’s voice echoes in the wind,

 soft as a lullaby, and she steps back.

A bathtub in a borrowed apartment,

 its porcelain throat wide open.

 She pictures red ribbons unfurling from her wrists,

 but her sister’s laugh,

 that summer they danced in the rain,

 stains the water with memory.

She rides the subway,

 each screech a scream she cannot voice.

 A pill bottle rattles in her purse like bones in a charlatan’s pouch.

 She thinks of swallowing the stars,

 but her best friend’s tears would flood the city.

She stands at the edge of the West Side Highway,

 cars blurring past like time itself.

 She could step forward,

 become a headline,

 but imagining her father’s hands,

 calloused and trembling,

 pulling her back from the curb

arrested the thought.

A gun shop window reflects her face,

 fractured by neon.

 She sees the bullet as a punctuation mark,

but her lover’s arms,once a harbor,

 wrap around her in memory,

and she cannot pull the trigger.

She bikes through Central Park at dusk,

 the trees whispering secrets she’s forgotten.

 The city glows like a wound oozing with light.

 She feels the ache of wanting to disappear and the ache of wanting to stay.

By midnight,

amidst a steady downpour,

she is still alive.

 Not because she found peace,

 but because every method of dying taught her something about living.

She walks home,

hoping the rain could wash away her self-destructive thoughts,

as she whispers to herself,

“I will try again tomorrow,

 not to die,

but to find the reason not to.”