a small peace

so here's what i've learned: we are, you and me are, the lot of us, we are born with a gnawing inside us. and you know, when it uncurls, it's so big, so frightening that we can only try to plug it up - you push someone against a wall, i eat those little cola gummy bottles, we weave some small thing out of grass and flowers, or we drink. there's years of stuffing things into the hole, wet rags and french fries and fingers - like, we barely even notice. and then after a time, after embarrassing incidents at snowy bus stops, we start thinking about why it's there and if we can know why it's there, that we can stop it. and we feel the gnawing in our bedrooms and in class and at parties and we ask it why it's there. we give it different reasons, but that's just another kind of stuffing too. listen, i'm not saying some people can't find out. maybe they do, but it hasn't worked out for me. the gnawing is never going to stop happening, there's some gasp in my code that is still echoing through me, but it's there like my hairline or my weirdly tiny pinky toenail, by accident. it's just an echo, a live-in ghost. i'm not trying to explain it anymore because it doesn't mean anything about me.