strange steps take us back

how anxious, anxious worry, after all this time; like no time's passed at all. i looked down into the grate between my feet, i saw the 6 flying underneath me, like i could have slid into it, flat on top, howling through the underground of our city. what would have been our city, what's now so full of ash that we sweat soot. i got my fortune told when i was 11, i was in copenhagen, she read my palm. she told me i would travel around the world. she wasn't wrong. but i think i traveled to all the wrong places, i fell in love with all the wrong cities, and all the wrong languages. you weren't wrong. that's a shame. it would be easier if you were wrong.

you know when you're sitting in class, you're not in college yet, you're at that awkward age where it matters when you're wrong, you've got about 6 more years 'til you stop giving a shit, and your teacher asks one of those open-ended questions. those "challenging" questions, the ones that are supposed to be "objective". so you raise your hand to answer, you tell her what you think it means, she tells you that you're wrong. you're not brave enough yet to fight her, so you slink back down into your desk, and there's 23 eyes on you, just looking at you. you can't read their faces, you hope for the worst. that's what it feels like every day with you. i feel like a humiliated pre-pubescent girl, you're the classmates and you're the teacher all in one cruel package, you're just constantly humiliating me and im just standing there, silently taking it, like i'm naked in a crowd of people, and they're all circling my flaws. like those sororities-gone-wrong stories you read about in Teen Vogue. you're so careful to build sentences that set me up for failure. picking up each word with tweezers, making this painting that's full of shame, and it reads like my body.

it impressed me. you're not from here, and i'm better at this language than you are, but you can still bring me down. i guess that comes with the ex-lover territory. i guess you're always gonna have that over me, you'll hold it over my head, cause i deserve it.

...où pas...