All the Broken Things
Mamma always told me that I wore my pain like I wore my clothes, form-fitted and too close to the skin. The melancholy always clung in layers across my ribs and at the corners of my mouth, my eyes reflecting the knives that had skewered me through.
She would preach for me to swallow those bitter pills. "No one will love a sad, broken girl," she'd say as she handed me the needle. And I'd stitch wounds and powder scars until I was the perfect illusion of whole. But the stones thrown always found their way back home, chipping armor and weakening my bones.
And I would crack.
And crack.
And crack.