My Other Half

Not still dead, not yet entirely living. A strange series of masks, a woman passing as a corpse passing as a man.

My life is kept somewhere else. I catch glimpses of it, but like dust in sunlight, it vanishes at a turn. I breathe it in with

one working lung. The other held in clenched fist, immobile, pending official assessment and properly ordered permission.

But still I breathe. Half alive and dead are much the same to them but I cherish my gaunt life and count every half heartbeat.