A reminder of how you prepared the lights and knives
and etherized the eyes, ready to
dissect my body:
 

1. You caress my skin with a knife, slipping through the mortal layers like a bow.

2. You extract my daydreams with curiosity, mounting them on a slide for examination, sighing when you realize they're so similar to your own.

3. You examine my soles and marvel at how tiny they are compared to those faded leather oxfords you never wear anymore.

4. You need to remove my organs, but first must remove:

5. My five-year-old self, who is weary and malnourished and occasionally alone

6. My four-year-old self, who is exactly the opposite- so much can change in a single year, single life,

7. My three-year-old self, who is always out to prove something and never proving it. But nonetheless succeeds at trying, which must count for something,

8. My two-year-old self, who knows more than she thinks she knows, but never enough to realize the sky isn't as impossibly blue as it may seem; so she keeps chasing the end of the rainbow,

9. My one-year-old self, who laughs at the impossibility of the situation.

10. You remove these pieces to make more room, although you suspect that there is something hiding in the lining

11. But you cover those thoughts with formaldehyde. It is easier.

12. You clean and prepare my skin, so there is no trace of my blood, which you sometimes mistake for your own.

13. You remove my bacteria and odor, and only vaguely notice a singing forest of constellations being replaced by this anesthetized silence.

14. You discard my olympic borne skeleton in an opaque black sack. If you cannot remember the sound of my bones chiming, do not worry- they will rattle in your bed at night.

15. Where I used to sit, gazing through wide windows, you install glass eyes. They are clearer and more beautiful than anything I have ever owned. I search through these greedily, but see nothing.

16. You stuff me with cotton and sawdust and clay. It is funny how easily these things can be substituted for my monsoon heart, and how I don't think anyone notices.

17. You take me gently in your hands, dancing through my skin with a disguised dagger. It as if you are sewing, but instead, do not create anything new from these disparate parts. In fact, it is like you are doing the opposite of sewing.

18. You create an immobile marionette, and are satisfied.

19. You are finished with me. 

20. But, it would seem, I am not finished with you.

You will know the things you don't want to remember-
A manual on how to kill me.