Recharting

1. Gather the pictures like blackberries in a basket. Take a match to the corners. See yourself in the flames.

2. Wash the toxin from your skin. Replace with moisturiser and sunlight.

3. Mould your lungs into something that will hold air; something that will empty of water.

4. Unload the gun that is memory, put it down. Hide the bullets.

5. Press lavender into the corner of your mind that keeps demanding closure. Remind yourself how many answers silence can hold (infinite).

6. Look their claims of happiness in the eye, even if it burns like pepper spray, stings like salt, screams like the past. Realise you will never get to see the truth behind their mask. Tell yourself it is okay if contentment clings to every aspect of their life. Your absence is not the only ingredient in their transformation. Their happiness does not equal your worthlessness.

7. Lay white sheets over all their words; kind and harsh, reassuring and damaging. Ointment and poison. Allow the dust to fall, settle, stay.

8. Book a plane ticket. Watch through a cloud speckled view as each haunted building shrinks, turns to particles of sand; able to fit in your palm; able to slip through your fingers. Let them.

9. Stand on ground they have not stood. Map out an uncharted part of your heart they have not touched or known or left as a wasteland.

10. Let the flowers bloom there. Bring them home and let the seeds yield restoration.