The beginning is bright.

It’s peaking around the edges of my arcade-won sunglasses and shrinking my pupils.

They become the size of the head of a needle I have to pull myself through.

“Easy,” I think. The first of the seven sins.

The beginning is trembling hands.

I can’t tell if it's from my coffee or my nerves,

Something good or evil,

Electric within me now.

I’m always sick to my stomach anyway.

The beginning is the water ring left on the table from a molding vase.

It’s the petals falling from a wilted flower.

The petals fall onto the leaves,

Fall into the vase,

And fall onto the floor.

Not that I can tell the difference. A mess is a mess, no matter what.

In the beginning, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

It rotted on the root, biblically.

The beginning is a tea light turned to wildfire.

It’s road rash.

It’s a broken CD player.

It's roadkill.

It’s a crescent moon smile and a bug bite the size of a quarter,

The feeling of déjà vu when your second sibling is born, but not your third.

It’s the reminder that you’re not hungry, you’ve just been craving meat for three days.

It’s good and it’s evil and I can never tell the difference.

The middle is dimmer.

Its smoke signals rising from midpoints, milestones, and skipping stones apart,

With wreaths of victory and failure, good and evil, hovering on the path.

I inhale them as I walk along.

The middle is a welt, swollen, standing in salute.

I scratched it open myself,

Though who’s to say what was under it to make it itch so bad in the first place?

I inhale as the fingernail marks weep.

The middle is the pond I used to spend my beginnings circling,

As if I were the water and it were the drain, not the other way around.

I can’t seem to visit it anymore without thinking I’ll fall in and drown.

I inhale just to check that I haven’t already.

The middle is the reflection I see when I look into that pond.

I see myself from a year ago,

From the beginning,

From when I was better,

From when I was sicker.

I can’t tell the difference.

The middle is the houseplant that caught a cold and died on my windowsill.

It was never going to survive in that pot anyway.

It was limp before I had the chance to save it.

It was sick before I knew that plants could get sick.

I should stop measuring things in terms of sickness and health, good and evil,

Because I can’t tell the difference.

The middle is a box of tissues I’ve resigned to keeping in my car.

It’s a heat stroke before it hits noon.

It’s a wound, a tattoo,

The prettiest wound I’ve ever seen.

I’ve had a knack for leaving permanent things on my body long enough to know

The difference between those, at least.

They’re both good.

Unlike the end.

The end is pitch.

It’s a name I don’t go by printed onto a diploma I never shook a hand for,

Almost two years ago but somehow still ahead of me.

It’s the shadowbox of imprisoned butterflies on my nightstand.

It’s the rug bunching up under my bed frame. I’m too weak to lift it up to fix it,

Too strong at keeping myself weak. I do it to stay good but I know it makes me evil.

The end is the clock ticking two minutes slow.

It’s the first aid kit I emptied in three months.

It’s the dust on my paintbrush,

The dust on the piano keys,

The dust on my bible.

The end is a breath, in or out, I do not know.

When your stomach sucks in for both, you can’t really tell the difference.

You’d think I would know by now- it’s the end after all.

But still, I lock my fingers to pray (good) until they turn blue (evil),

I bow my head in prayer (good) inside the bowl of a toilet (evil),

I buy enamel pins that donate small profits to charities (good),

Only to poke the skewered ends into my left side like a corkboard (evil).

I confess all of this to an open sky, only to hear a faraway crow answer back.

I wish things were different (good).

I wish things were different (evil).

And after the blinding beginning,

The smoldering middle,

And the ashes of the end,

When I can’t tell which ones have come and gone already

And which ones are to punish me still,

I tell myself it was meant to be this way- that there was no other way.

I tell myself there was nothing I could do to keep that fire alive,

To keep anything alive.

The coals were going cold before I got to them.

I tell this to myself until I believe nothing else,

Though I always make sure to leave out the part where

I don’t know the difference between

The flame

And the fuel.

I leave out the part where I realize,

There is no difference at all.