I unzipped my skin and all my bones fell out. This was not by design: I meant to loose my soul from the forest of my lungs, unfurl its banner past my legs and my toes and there, in the blameless earth, find a new alchemy for living. Instead—bones. Ribcage smiling across the grass. Femurs and tibias and clavicles in their wet dynasties between dirt, between roots, between the fern crawling its quiet way through this lower heaven.

You must not let them recollect me. Sing to the wind until it remembers its promise: The only law is motion. The only scripture is change. I have no more excuses; metacarpal tumble, they are lost to the loam. Only this reason remains: I wanted motion. I needed change. No wind can reach the cage they are crafting. I was staring down the barrel of stillness—the bleak gargoyle, its dazzling gunpowder, those months when only we were hysterical. Everyone else watched us from the boiling sea. Policies fell upon us, hard rain. Every headline a new lash of laughter: can it get worse? I decided I would not bear witness; they would strike no pillar of salt from me.

I remanded myself back to nature. I slipped open my skin and out came the bones. Perhaps this is for the better. The flesh has always sat strangely but the bones never betrayed. Freed from the burden of bearing, they do now as they always dreamed: kiss the moss, kiss the leaves. My bones are conferring with the earth. My bones are considering the vagrant seeds. They too wish to grow of themselves more selves, coccyx chrysalis unspooling into spines, into shoulder blades, into the steep curve of a jaw, a jewel, jumbled bouquet of geometries never to be resolved. A forensic mystery: did these bones belong to a man?

What is a man but bones and bones and bones, black wind pushing through a tunnel. This is what I learned through the unsteady years of needles and tubing and scars corded across my thickening flesh, fat recanting its vows of softness, settling against the pelvis in pouting shelves. Muscle is malleable but the bones remain. They are accustomed, now—to molting, eschewing, stripping my self from myself until I am more. Here is a riddle: what grows happier the more you take away? I never knew such joy until that day. Emerging from that blissed, undreaming haze and realizing, at last, I was free. I was only a box of pieces, but those pieces were not me.

You must not let them regather me. Not even the heap my bones have left behind. Pour my eyes into the river. My tongue, threaded through the trees. What must you tell them, when they ask where I am? Listen and listen, even the earth will not say: