which I cannot write, though I do want to. It does feel good to break. It does
feel better to be broken, for one’s outsides to match their insides, the urge

to hurt oneself never truly going away, instead metabolizing into the body,
subsumed into instinct. Inside me, a taut worry presses from beneath

the skin, a mumbled fear twitches like a muscle, a deep-set understanding
itches like a scab: that the tendency to respond to stimuli like this is inborn.

As in: the dog gnaws off its injured leg. The bee delivers its singular sting.
The porcupine never stops pricking itself, stays slicked with fatty antibiotic.

The owl swallows bone and feather in order to eat, reliant on its vomiting,
while the panda simply cannot digest its bamboo. And the blue whale

beaches itself when it knows its time has come, and now we take off
to the museum, stare up at its suspended and incomplete skeleton, and maybe

this moment of awe, this afternoon in which you have dragged me out of bed
will be the best argument: we do not owe health and safety to the world—

but we do. Or at least I do, to you, Eli, and I’m sorry— there is no conclusion
here, and I see my wounded friends, or I don’t, but I love them, and I do,

and all these rhythms soon will change, the split arm no longer splitting
towards the truth, the blood sleeping more quietly than we remember,

the grown salmon swimming back into freshwater to spawn.