Instructions for Unraveling

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Step 1: Locate the edges of yourself.

Run your hands along the hem of your body.
You might find loose threads,
fingers catching on the faint lip of a scar
or the place where your skin thins out,
pale and stretched like the waxy underside of a moth's wing.
You were always a collection of seams, weren’t you?
A patchwork of patched things, stitched tight and uneven.

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Step 2: Remember the phone that wouldn’t stop ringing.

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Not the one in your pocket now—
that sterile slab of glass and static—
but the one that lived on the wall,
beige as the belly of an old mushroom,
its cord spiraling down like a hanging root.
It rang for years, didn’t it?
A metallic shriek that pulled your name into its jaws
and swallowed it before you could answer.

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Step 3: Inhale the ghost of a hallway.

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Chicken fat, burnt toast, the sour sting of vinegar on tile grout.
And the bleach,
it bloomed sharp and cold,
cutting the air like a razor dragged through velvet.
You hated it, said it smelled like hospitals
or teeth scraped against porcelain.
You said it smelled like forgetting.

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Step 4: Teach yourself to fold.

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Press your ribs inward until they overlap,
accordion-like,
your spine collapsing into something
small enough to fit in a shoebox.
You folded paper cranes, didn’t you?
Back when your fingers were slim and obedient,
before they grew brittle and glass-tipped.
The cranes never flew,
but you tied them to the ceiling,
and watched their wings twitching in the draft like nervous insects.

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Step 5: Destroy something delicate.

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A doll, a wine glass,
the curve of someone’s trust.
Feel the shatter like static electricity—
acute, startling, a sound that lingers.
Breathe it in.
Swallow the splinters.
Let them sit in your throat,
each shard a small and perfect rebellion.

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Step 6: Learn the art of concealment.

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Wrap the splinters in that velvet,
hide the cranes in shoeboxes.
Bite down on the string that dangles from your wrist,
its frayed end trailing back to the sweater
you unraveled when you were seventeen.
Say nothing about the vases you’ve tipped over,
the bones you’ve folded.
Let silence settle into your mouth
like ash.

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Step 7: Wait for the questions to come.

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When someone asks, open your mouth.
Let the cranes spill out, one by one,
their wings damp and trembling.
Let the bleach bloom again, sharp and clean,
a chemical symphony rising from your lungs.
Give them the string from your wrist—
its knots will come undone in their hands.

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Step 8: If they stay,
show them the room where you keep your ruins.
Let them touch the broken doll’s face,
the cracked rim of the wine glass.
Let them cradle the splinters you’ve hidden,
their palms stained with your ash.

Step 9: If they leave,
gather the string.
Tie it around the nearest crane,
a leash for your tattered ghosts.
Begin folding again,
your fingers trembling but determined,
your hands reshaping the fragments
into something small and strange
that will one day feel like flight.

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