there are some days where she's
more helpless than others, and all the
leaves on their tree has dried with age.
she leans on fragile branches and grasps rotting bark,
where one wrong move is ten feet down.

in her dreams, she builds treehouses
at dawn and sleeps through sunsets, and
holds on to their unspoken promises so that she's
not left dangling with one foot in the air--

and today she just can't catch her breath,
can't even see her hands stretched out in front of her through this fog...
today is a little more
suffocating
than most days,
and all she can do is recite a
mantra of clichés and
hope for the closest miracle.