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an apology letter to my string of turtles by Alissa Miller



i have piled your shriveled shells in the corner of the windowsill. my knees fused together, i let the bedsheet terror consume me. i didn’t notice how your roots never reached the soil, or how the water has just been collecting at the bottom. every day, i watched the sunlight singe your face and called it beautiful, that golden hour burn. your limbs were scorched and severed. the landlord special sprinkled green. i threw back the curtains in a craving for comfort, and you were always caught in the crossfire. you shed so much of yourself, just pleading for this selfish Creature to notice your withering. 


we’re the same, you and i. we rot at the surface while some greater Being drowns us in water. we could drink; we do not. something shakes us, like a wrinkled curtain or a dead dog, and we pull out our hair, wailing for our mothers or wherever we came from to please take us back. i tear open my face in the mirror and there you are in the background, wearing my split ends and dirty roots. i think i haven’t been looking at you because you look a lot like me. you were weeping while i welcomed the sunlight, but i couldn’t hear it over my own.


your leaves and my legs, drying up in the folds of a blanket. i know i can’t save you. but still, come home with me. let me prune what’s dead and bury it. let me kiss your cuts with lips that know the feeling. let me finally give you a name, any name you want.

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