By Erica Phelps
Edited by Jessica Liu and Alloe Mak

“For someone so quiet, you seem to have a lot to say.”
Maybe so. Maybe the world is tragically loud and I am one of the unfortunate ones who are
pushed back to listen.
To absorb.
Maybe I do speak. Maybe to speak utterly and entirely is not to be understood.

I speak in smiles, in stories, and in poems
texts and touches.
I put my speech in puzzles, never saying what I mean.
I am up to interpretation.
See me as you will and maybe we’ll be all the while safer.

“What are you thinking?”
“We never talk about anything serious.”
“I don’t feel close to you.”
“Say something. Please.”

I whisper my withheld words at night, alone.
Pretending that lying next to me is a friend, or a stranger I haven’t met,
or the last person I’ve kissed.
I let it all out while burying it back in.

Maybe one day someone will unravel me and
under my skin they’ll find my body and
I’ll have written all over her face:
This is who I am and
this is who I wish I were and
this is how I think
and this is how I wish I did.

Until then I ask you (I beg you)
to watch me (to see me) and paint me
in watercolours that match my clothes.
You show me my image and I smile,
then you tear it to pieces and demand
to read my under-skin words.
Is there only one way to see me truly?

“You should speak louder, people want to hear what you have to say.”
“I want to know you.”
Know me as you will,
for the world is loud and I am full of sound
and slightly too terrified
of my body
to speak.