#intense vent

And instead I hate their smiles, I feel like I've been stolen from, and I want it back, I might even be selfish enough to imagine stealing theirs. I hate how they sleep at night without keeping half a gaze on their bedroom door while praying to God that she'll leave me alone for just one night, just this night, maybe never again. I hate how they speak, soft and reasonable, laughing when they disagree, like it's absurd and momentary. The absence of grudges and old anger; festering bruises and wounds are mine, not theirs. Yet I wish I could peel them off, rub out all my scars. But I have to acknowledge them, draw pretty hearts and birds and flowers on my skin instead because I love it now, and I must love it always.

And in the library, young parents will sit with their children for hours, introducing them to the world one letter, one picture at a time, a hazy halo of love wrapping them tight and giving them trust and hope. And I WANT THAT. I WANT TO BE WRAPPED IN SKIN THAT LOVES ME BACK AND HANDS THAT WOULD NEVER HARM ME. I WANT ALL OF IT, ALL THAT I NEVER HAD. I want more than I deserve but I also want what I need and I confuse myself to tears and painful skin again because why? Why was it me and why was there no one? 

I don't want to wake up in bed feeling phantom fingers and hearing sloppy footsteps and smelling the vomit and alcohol and suffocating smoke and metal wrapped around my leg and water in my lungs. I want to sleep so hard, sleep so much, that I wake up with clear eyes, just for once, because I know there's peace out there, I know I can get to it, but I'm stuck and I'm always fighting the tide pulling me away, pulling me under, again and again and again I'm drowning in myself and drowning in the world. The stress becomes so much that everything is spinning and the most logical thing seems to be to smack my head against the wall as many times as I need to make it all stop for just a few minutes, just a few days, just a few years. I don't want to be hungry I don't want to want I don't want to be cold or scared. I don't want the dark again, or the thoughts of terrible endings or the fears. I want the world to STOP, I just need to get off until everything stops moving so fast.

I want but I can't have, I want to be happy but I just can't do it, I want them all to pause but it's just not possible, I want them to understand but they just won't budge, I just want want want it all to stop stop stop. I want to accept help and love but I don't know what to do with it. The first and last people I loved turned a wire halo into a blunt weapon and all I can remember is days of misery dark and so much betrayal over and over and over again and it became easier to hide inside, deep underground, where sound and heartbeat are muffled and the cold so seeps into your core that time finally almost feels stopped and the dark is a friendly monster but also a predictable beast and no one can judge your weakness when everything is black. You can almost convince yourself that all that emptiness is okay, and all those scars and open wounds are imaginary, and that tomorrow will be different, and the cycle comes full circle of hope despair hate hopelessness.

And I don't have to worry about words, they can't stare me in the eye without light, I don't have to think about anything. I want them but I can't have them, they don't belong on my lead tongue or in my frozen hands if I find myself so undeserving of everything, so devoid of spiritual color that they're invisible and useless. They taste like blood and ocean and desert sands far away and my leaking heart on the bedroom floor, soaking the carpet with everything I hoped for and will never have.

I don't want myself sometimes and my mind is a jungle full of monsters and everyday I'm fighting and exploring and cursing. And I'm full of that bitterness, that toxic rot, covered in a thin layer of peeling paint. Somehow my slaughtered heart pushes my aching bones from the bed, from the underground, from the corners and the chairs, and I'm smiling like pins and laughing like a punishment but sometimes I feel it, somewhere inside, something like chewing gum and pink duct tape quietly mending a broken part of me, and the flowers on my scars smile for me.

And I still want, I want so bad, so bad that my soul stretches like a rubber band, stretches as far as it can go just to find no purchase, to snap back and leave another bruise. But I have some glow in the dark stars now, so I'm not alone with the monsters in the dark, and they tell me what I need to know, that this is not forever, that there is more left than I knew, I just need to try, and try with my love and hang on when the world spins because it won't stop for me or anyone.

I still lust for the smiles, want them pasted in my mind and my mood. They still make me sick. They might always make me sick. I'll make my own somehow, if no here one can give me love then I'll find it somewhere else.