estlincummings

i don’t want to go back.

I want to, too, but I can’t. I’ve spent three years slicing into my own skin to feel, a year and a half trying to kill myself, and a year in therapy and the hospital trying to change it all.

I haven’t changed myself, and I can’t possibly hope to change you.

I know you need me, but I need you too, and sometimes you just don’t listen. You don’t try to ignore me, I know. You have your own problems, I know.

But it scares me to think that you love me, that you want to spend your life with me when you don’t even know how much I’m suffering.

I want to tell you, and you want to know, but I can’t make you understand. You can’t even understand what’s going on with you? How are you supposed to understand what’s going on with me?

And it terrifies me, it does, when I know that you have so much meddling with your mind. How do I tell you that sometimes I still think about killing myself when you text me nightly that you’re tired of living?

I can’t.

And I don’t even know what it is that I can’t do.

Sleep? Talk? Live?

Scratch that.

I know I'll never be good enough for you.

You want someone who isn't terrified by grand gestures, someone who will paint cities at your feet and have the population adore you, someone who will tear down the walls and build a new world around you, someone who will know exactly how to whisper "I love you" at the right times, someone who will caress your soul in a way that will make you feel eternally warm and safe.

But I'm here and I can barely take care of myself.  I sleep until the sun is too exhausted to shine, and I forget to take the Prozac haphazardly stored in three different bottles, and I try to hold you up so much that I let myself get buried.  I can't overcome all of my own fears, and I don't know how to comfort you when you face yours.  I'm so tired of myself I don't have the energy to give you the fantasies you so desperately crave.

You want someone who can give you the world, and I can barely give you myself.  I'm just a shell, a shadow, broken remains of a person I once hoped to be, and I'm sorry.

I wish you could forgive me.

You tell me that I'm the best thing that's happened to you, but that can't be true because I know you're so unhappy.

Maybe I'm the worst thing that's happened to you.

Maybe you shouldn't forgive me.

you.

There are stars constantly twinkling in your eyes, and you breathe stardust from your lungs. An impossible systems of cells that make tissue and tissue that makes organs and organs that work to make a living, breathing organism.  You are here.  You are alive.

One little mishap doesn’t mean you’re a failure.  It means that out of all the possibilities of mistakes, your body only fell for one.  There are trillions and trillions it could have let slip by, but it didn’t.  You are still here.  You are still alive.  Don’t let the chemicals get to you.  A pill a day is annoying as hell, but it works miracles.

You are worth it.  Remember it, repeat it, say it, mean it.

You are here, and you are alive, and the universe didn’t destroy itself to have you give up.  It destroyed itself so it could make something as beautiful as you.  And maybe some patterns in your brain got worn down, and maybe you’re worn down, too, but that doesn’t mean you get to give up.

You are here, and you are alive, and you are worth it.

Remember it, repeat it, say it, mean it, keep it

I'm scared of happiness.  I'm afraid of contentment, because all I know is the sadness.  The sorrow has been wrapped around me for so long, like a security blanket. 

Who am I without it?