all my road before me

I've been sweeping metaphors into a pile at my feet since last night when I woke up and found Belle dead across the page - laid out like she was swimming, outlined in grey chalk script, that curled away in looping words into a smiley face. It read, 'Juliet was never Juliet if she fell in love with Paris and laughed behind the curtains of the stage.'
Menelaus smirked, looked at me and mumbled something about Troy and humiliation. He said, 'I keep getting these slashes all across my dreams but for the life of me I don't know how they got there.' 'Yeah, me too', I said, and lifted up my shirt to show my chest, 'but after all this blood, it was Galatea carving me instead.'

Today I think I'm done with trying to guess the shape of truth by examining the exit wounds I use to feel so hollow. Something tells me I should stand, take a walk and look away, and be glad it didn't miss anything vital. So give me one more swallow of this bitter conversation, and I'll wrench it down again, shake my head and hit send. Maybe this way I can finally poison that wandering Lancelot, whose madness always keeps me looking too far back, to a girl I once saw standing with a huge fake smile, holding hands and getting married on the train tracks. But it didn't take me all sixty of her photographs this time to realize the ghost was just a shadow burned on my retinas long ago, and, uncomfortable as I've been lately with feeling this normal, it makes the walk a little easier, just to know.