I serve as invisible guardian to myself. All at once the princess in the tower and the armored savior down below. I strip the toxins from bad moments and leave the sweet. I swallow poison so that my conscious self won’t have to know the acrid taste of the truth. What I’m left with are hollow memories, gutted of their flesh like sweet langoustines. The outside is an inviting, deep red and its meat was tainted with the things I’d rather not remember.

But no one is entirely protected. Not a soul that walks the earth isn’t aware of the soot and the smoke. They see the people who have been casted out crumpled on the sidewalk. The world as we know it could be implicitly sweet but I still taste the blood between my teeth. And still, I try. I find ways to spin a bad day on its head. I root through the unpleasantness for something worth salvaging. I take the bitter pill, so that my self may never have to acknowledge it was there at all.