you want to be god, don't you girl?

we stand in the way of what we want, our hearts don’t let us sleep.

The first time I opened myself, I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror, hands shaking as I dive in and pull a list of maladies from my throat, a hollow scream coming out of my throat and burning my tongue, leaving ashes on my lips as I spit into the porcelain. My hands tear at my chest, splitting my ribcage and pulling out broken bits of rib with regrets etched into the bone, melancholy and panic leaving my lungs and landing in the sink, staining it bruise-blue. My fingernails rip at my stomach, pulling at the congenital shame that has lingered there since before I was old enough to speak its name. I tug at it and tear it from my stomach and stuff it down the plughole. I reach behind my eyes and pull out sixteen years of night terrors. They have plagued me since conception like an imaginary friend I don’t remember creating and never wanted in the first place and now I want them out of me. I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. Blood stains my palms and drips down my kneecaps. My chest is open. My throat is a cavity. This is a brutal form of cleansing. How wonderful it is to be pure.

I swear to God, I’ll never understand how you can stand there straight and tall and see I’m crying and not do anything at all.

I’ve built a barricade out of empty coffee cups– Stay back, I’m warning you, I’ll shatter them all, I don’t exist, don’t acknowledge me–  I’ve built a barricade and pretended there was such a thing As pure, isolated safety. Pure isolation is never really safe. I’ve always been made of fragile glass, eggshells, Crayons split at the middle. Skeleton leaves, rotting raspberries, clocks Ticking down instead of counting up. I have slit this skin almost in two, trying To find something inside More than death and fragility. More than sickness. Destroying what I once thought to be a walking corpse Is no way to find a home. Crouched behind a barricade Is no way to live a life. I want to be made of dandelion wishes, Four leaf clovers, amethyst pendants And lithium quartz– I want to be made of faith in this world And in this body And in this life. I want to be made of springtime wind. I want to be made of summertime rainfall. I am taking the coffee cups apart, one by one, Filling each as I go, taking a break– These things take time– I am particularly reluctant to rush the process. I am taking the coffee cups apart, Careful never to shatter them, Careful never to split my veins on their edges. When the barricade is down, I will be made of coffee sweetened with honey And the sweet syrup of survival.

A shadow passes the window— my mind cries Bird but I’ve no proof. A shadow  is a shadow & not its counterpart,  looming, fat with being. 

Memory / is another name for ghosts and their awful hunger.

This was when I learned that you have to give up your life as you know it to get a new one: that sometimes you need to let go of everything you’re clinging to and start over, whether because you’ve outgrown it or because it’s not working anymore, or because it was wrong for you in the first place.

It’s easy to think god created man

so drunk just running your hands through hair// it feels so soft doesn’t it? life was never supposed to be so hard. You thought is was going to be over already; god doesn’t give a shit about you.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

Wanting to die, deciding or not to die, already lost / and gone, irrelevant not only in the last moment / but having diminished all along, not knowing when the diminishment began. / Perhaps it never began; I was always / lessening, losing, disappearing, / from my first breath, imperceptibly at first.