compliments

"you really are gorgeous you know" (the unsubtle subtext ignored).

"I like you."

"You make me proud."

Sprinkled over dusty decades.

These are the scraps I grovelled for, the tokens I clung to, a handful of glassy beads clutched to my breast.

I took them out at night and counted them, my treasures, valued for their scarcity, rough surfaces worried glossy.

Splayed against the void, jewels on velvet.

I swallowed them one by one, to make them real, to make them mine, and choked on pebbles and ash.