Triptych // Chooser

When we were young we would borrow from each other

meaningful things: a rock in the shape of an arrowhead,

or a time-charged Pokémon card, more valuable than any heirlooms that came our way

as ancestors faded like ink on a broadsheet.

I grew up like that - everything was mine and nothing at all.

They’re in sepia now, these memories: I’ve have washed them too many times and they’ve faded at the edges;

their colour returned to the aether it was borrowed from.

I took to staring for hours on end

into a mirror I’d inherited from my mother.

I thought of all the things I’d traded:

my ginger hair for strands of chocolate brown,

my freckles for knowledge I couldn’t un-know,

my smooth forehead for nights of laughter

preserved like fossils in straight, deep lines.

Now I wear petals for armour (in the hopes of peace)

and cut my sword with care at the break of every glassy, carmine dawn.

I have no time to return, and I hold no receipts -

my life is lived by choice;

my life belongs to me.