Inkwell 2018-2019

Sticky

by Megan Asbrand

Loving you is like watching paint dry;

you can look but never touch. The paint is plastered hastily on paper walls so pale and thin,

and the slick crimson tint has turned murky and sticks to the wall in chips and bunches. but it would stick under your fingernails. Just thinking about it makes you feel it crawling in all the places you can’t quite reach.

You could pick it off,

You feel the paint bleeding behind your left shoulder blade,

trickling between your toes, whistling within your inner ear.

But you know you’re making progress on this wall,

even if it doesn’t look pretty quite yet, because paint has to dry sometime.

So you live your life

and try not to think about it,

a wall perpetually wet,

because you are too afraid to touch it to test.

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Mackenzie Guillot