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it makes me realize the core of who i am hasn’t changed, has it? all that darkness and i still bleed red. all that coldness and i hate myself when i’m not as cold as i want to be, when emotions claw at me unwelcome. God, it eviscerates me, and there i go, putting on the best show of my life like i’m not torn apart. even to myself. i am both performer and the audience. but it’s those nights when the two meld together and create this new, nebulous shadow that’s out of my reach that i despise it all. i don’t want to lose control over myself like that. except i do. i want it gone. i want a mold, a case, a chest where i lie like limp treasure, no matter how rusty.

the way i run away from the ability to feel is frightening, because i know whatever i feel, i feel deeply, and i’m not willing to be sucked into a whirlpool of regret and nostalgia… no, i’d rather move on, or pretend that you weren’t a major part of my life, one that created seismic changes in how i view and understand myself. i’d rather think ahead and busy or distract myself with anything and everything except remember you. but when the clock strikes after the evening, and the night envelopes me in quiet, it’s hard not to fill the silence with memories. i think i’m really tired and i have a hard time accepting that. i have a hard time accepting that i’m hurt. yes, i might rewatch that movie because it’s one of my favorites. maybe my most favourite. but how do i scrub it clean of you? time, work your magic. time, heal me. time, don’t let me feel anything.

the pattern always repeats itself. i am outside of the glass looking in and everyone is so grateful i can see them clearly while i’m nothing but a blur to them, a hazy apparition. i feel sick to my stomach knowing my heart wants something but the world is making sure i don’t get it. as if there was an elaborate plan somewhere to make as much of a fool out of me as possible, and the sky and trees and wind are in on it while i’m not. a floor plan kept hidden from me, so i keep stepping on the broken tiles and falling into all kind of messes and quagmires. i feel sick to my stomach knowing the thickness of the glass they use to measure my strength— they can always fall apart around me because i’ll catch them. because i’m infallible, i’m all the bravado i make myself out to be and i have infinite hands enough for everyone in need to grab. i’m sick. i’m sick to my stomach knowing my life is a spiral staircase descending into these repetitions that isolate me while making me the fortress everyone seeks shelter in.

I imagine this quote tattooed in cursive handwriting across my back in an ink so deceptive it matches the exact shade of my skin. Embedded into my spine, jutting out in the form of ribs and femurs before creating the whole of who I am, a line of shame, desire, disgust made into bone. So much feeling ingrained into one person the way I stuffed my jacket into my bag earlier today, getting angry at how it wouldn’t fit. That’s how I am— coiled like a serpent, thrashing, slinking and striking at anything that moves. “Fragile not like a flower but like a bomb.” They don’t know this, but I’ve been set on fire ever since I was seventeen and still can’t put it out. So it comes out in plumes of intensity, of needing to take the lead, of all this energy beaming out of me and an unexplained eagerness and does no one see I’m a mess, all this distress. They say it’s the stars that burn but when was I ever a star? My life has barely begun. The cursive tattoo is swivelling and swerving with all its perfect little rotundities and flicks of a trained wrist. My mind is spinning, as if the tattoo’s curves became a Ferris wheel on which I’m a permanent passenger. I want to get down. I’m tired of a ride with no destination in sight. The journey is repetitive and nauseating.

i’m supposed to fall in and out of spaces and people and relationships, supposed to take the punches and flowers and words of encouragement and malice. my life is not an assorted dish— it’s a bowl of food from every continent of people, of rice that taught me to and tastes like, “that’s what you should do” and a bit of nasty stew saying, “that’s what you don’t. now you know.” i’m only 21. I keep telling myself i’m supposed to screw up. 21. 21. 21. 12. the 12 year old girl is still alive and now she’s 21 and has a bowl of thousands of assortments that make no sense but they kind of do and i’m losing my mind because i’m only 21. may everyone that made me grow up too early never have access to the youth that’s still alive in me, that cries like she’s just born, as if every suffering reincarnates me to someone else.

i would never defend such methods of pushing one to do better. but here i am, following them. a slave to the very thing i resented. i set these goals out of love, but it feels like a serious project. i’m tired. why the rose at all? why the factory ever? i want to be encased by safety instead of free in a cage— but see, i feel caged by love, too. i don’t know. one minute i’m a porcelain doll and the next i have the elusion of a ghost.

i told myself i’d face my emotions this year. that i’d feel them instead of running away, instead of bolting the door behind them until they overwhelm its hinges, flood the room i call routine and drown me. but i’m not. i’m not sure what made me this way. my emotions are separate from me, another person that looks exactly like me just with endless tears or anger colouring her skin. she terrifies me. her capacity to feel terrifies me. the dive her heart takes in a barrel of pain petrifies me, so deep it’s like i’ve spent my whole life underground. does anyone have a cleaver? hand it over at once. there’s someone I need to separate from.

tell me why you still have a hold on me twelve years later.

how degrading it feels to be human.

veins in my arms.

but now that i really think, i realize i can never not love you. no matter the fact you broke my heart. that you broke me. there is an unceded part of my heart that always belonged to you, no matter how much i denied and disavowed that about myself. no matter how chipped away and broken it was. you cannot scoop love out of blood— it is enmeshed in every drop. so i begrudgingly admit in this text that i love you— i love you so much. but i can’t see myself saying it to you again.