#anger is valid

sometimes it's hard to control your anger. 

sometimes anger is red-hot, fiery, and passionate; as if there was never a time when it was not burning passion and clenched teeth and shouting at the wall, shouting at someone, shouting in your car on the freeway going ninety. 

but sometimes anger gets tired. feels like after the roar of the flame comes the embers. the barely burning log still lit only by sheer luck and lack of wind. sometimes anger hurts in the tense way that makes your jaw hurt, it makes any kind of movement stiff with tense muscles, trying not to cry in a weird hollowed-out red color— like it's pink but almost isn’t. 

sometimes being angry means clenching your teeth until your jaw hurts and letting your nails bite into your palms until there are tiny crescent-shaped cuts or bruises in your palms and letting your toes curl in your socks until the bones make a weird popping noise. 

but sometimes anger feeds and feeds into nothingness, after a while. sometimes you stay angry for so long, and then when you’re no longer angry, you don’t even remember exactly why you felt so pissed you could crack your teeth— it just doesn’t make any sense anymore. 

sometimes you’re angry only because you haven’t been in a while. 

sometimes it just hurts to breathe without acknowledging the tenseness of your muscles, the soreness of your jaw, the trembling of your fingers as you stare at them trying to calm down because they shaking too violently in the first place for you to do anything, so you hold up your hands to see how bad they are, and if you can make them still for a few seconds, but they end shaking even more violently because of the sudden focus on them. 

sometimes you’re angry.