Forty-Five

You’ll find me suspended in the pause between heartbeats and the beat of a worn drum. Searching for what was sacrificed to reach the complacency of tomorrow, to recollect the fragments of a youth spent wanting, yielding the better parts of myself in service of all I thought I needed to be. I’ve become that which decays—not from the frailty of my own humanity, nor from this shell of a body marked…