This could've been written by a grain of sand or an angry woman

-Ruby Browning

Walk all over me, I’ll let you. You won’t notice, but I’ll stay here, shift only a few feet, live for eons on the same patch of mottled, heat-warped earth, watch my mother breathe in and out, a swarm of life wrapping up dead things with a sun spotted gleam.

Set me alight, I dare you. People think life is alchemy and pain is the fire that burns you golden, forges you into something stronger. But I am not wrought of stardust, which is to say that I am not made of iron. All the burning does is make me a more acceptable form of fragile.

Shape me, mold me, put your hands on me, it’s not like I could stop you. I know the tricks, stick together, go limp, scream, scratch you, be unapproachable. And yet // I will be the castle, the future, the home, the material you can take for free. Lean too close, scrape out my lungs with your barbed wire claws, press me down. Listen to me when I say that just because I take the shape you want does not make me yours to hold.

But just you wait, wait until you stumble upon the vastness I hold right here between my fingers, in the gaps of my ribs, the hollow of my throat, the curve of my spine. I take the broken things, the dying, the jagged edges of me and still I stand sentinel under the sun. Are you listening? I withstand depth, chill, drought. You say I am so small, and you are right, but I am not singular. Take one look at everything we’ve done, everything we dream of, and you will see exactly who I am.