Lessons From the Kissing Booth

Our bones may as well be outer space, for all that we will ever see them without tools and photographs and uncomfortable accidents. It's only other people that get to look under our skin, long after we're gone, having turned disconnected and forever smiling gruesomely.

I think about my bones in the hands of future archaeologists, fragments extrapolated with plaster and reassembled wrong like a blank puzzle. They'll peer through the hollow tubes that once held me together and wonder, was she related to the birds? The thinning toward the elbow suggests that this species likely tended toward the sentimental. These colors, here, show a clear preference for whiskey over gin. There might be a few fossilized bits of gristle left, a solid string of ligament or a scraping of marrow, but mostly only bones, shedding dust on to the gloves of strangers. Building a portrait of me that I was never able to see.