A reflection

When I was a
kid,
I learned that cherry red lip balm is best used for kissing the parts of yourself you don't want others to see,
Is best used for this game
Of hide and seek.
Because we knew that
They were only looking for a definition of beauty to be defined by a reflection...

So cherry red lip balm became cherry red lipstick...
Lipstick so red you could've mistaken it for
Blood.
As if we got stained from trying to kiss away the parts of ourselves when we asked-
How tight can we pull this measuring tape around our waists before we suffocate?

So we plaster caution tape around ourselves like a crime scene,
An investigation of who's eyes were first to see our bodies as love letters,
Where they could just erase the words
I think your beautiful and I love you that we'd made out to our own skin,
Where they made us believe that there lips were ours.
But it worked.
Because we've all tried to lick ourselves clean and stop ourselves from bleeding,
We've all tried to envision that our scraps fit differently,
The parts we cut out that we didn't want anyone to see.
That our puzzle had a different picture on the box than what it came out to be.
But all of this
Shouldn't be a game of hide and seek where we run around buildings and hide behind windows because we know that everyone's only been taught to us them as mirrors
To never find the need
To look far enough to see to the other side...

The problem with breaking us down to our reflections,
Is that we spend so much time looking at ourselves we forget to let our hands feel our skin,
To remember...

To let our hands trace over our galaxy's of stars,
Bruises...
On our legs that we don't how they got there because we didn't feel the pain...
To feel our lips and be able to tell the difference between yours...
And someone else's.