Exoskeleton

I can’t help but look at you, you who had the misfortune of dying in my bed.

Your legs, stiff and twisted upon each other, your wings, crushed and delicate, your thousand eyes, equally as cold as they must have always been.

I reach out to touch you, to remove you from this sad little grave, but I can’t. My entire body recoils before my fingers even touch the shell of you. If I touch you I can never feel clean again, never be clean. Your death and dying will infect my body and never leave me.

I can still feel you crawling on my neck, as though you never left. You, my greatest and most nauseating vision of death. You, who I see drowning in shallow water, starving and becoming prey within these walls, and whose carcass will surely look like mine when I am made so small by this world and all its capacity to kill.

Where do I go from here?