Some nights there are storms inside, black islands rife with mischievous djiin and serpents the size of mountains, yawning to swallow me hole.
Some nights there is no sleep at all, my eyelids close against the turbulence of shame inside my chest, and hold the tears in, attempting to internally drown the unnatural fires of self-doubt.
Some nights I go insane, forgetting the lessons it has taken me so many aches and years to learn, forgetting strength, forgetting beauty.
Those nights make the rest of the universe shine with brilliant colours, I tell myself in the morning
when my thighs are stained with blood, and the torrent of hormones have slipped off again into their quiet corners of my skull.
Some nights it hurts so much that reason becomes irrevocably lost, and the strictly kept spaces inside myself turn into one deep primal scream.
Some mornings I crawl out onto the stoop, shivering in the chill, and peer at the striations of colour in each tulip petal, remembering that colour lives, that today I will conquer the universe again.