thinking too much too late

Or else pay for my therapy, we’ll see then

Cause being strong means nothing when

You’re a child who could use some saving

Now look at me, tough as nails and built like

A dandelion, I shake when the storms roll in

Like a goddamned chihuahua, and if I cry one more time

Because a psa reminded me of when

I called poison control for myself, knees weak,

I’ll snap

And suddenly I’m crying in my nutrition class

Avoiding eye contact. How do you explain that?

A sure strong thing I am. I walk like a kid without a hallway pass

Always checking over my shoulder and waiting

For something that will never come. The rain

Slows down, stops, I hold still best I can and

Don’t think I don’t remember, it was after

My seventeenth birthday, we ran around

Screaming in the old barn, hanging from the rafters

You told me growing old was for people who

had already found love, and ‘oh god is that a gray hair’

‘No, oh my god I’ll kill you’ or maybe just marry you

And I started thinking, I wouldn’t mind us

With wrinkles, fading like old pictures, somewhere

In the south, so our old bones stay warm, for now you push me

In the directory for the school

I found absence in the back left pocket

Of my favorite jeans.

I found absence

In every calendar year that you did not

Walk besides me on the way to lunch.

I found absence in my chest

Thick as cough syrup and twice as bitter

When you found something in New Orleans

That wasn’t in my right hand,

I used to tell myself little bedtime stories like, ‘once upon a time, you felt truly loved and safe’ or, ‘in a land, far, far away, someone understood you.’ They made me feel a little less alone. Like maybe in some parallel universe I was okay, and maybe that was enough.

I know platonic love like the back of my hand. When I have the energy I guess. But I don’t know how to explain, I didn’t learn how to like myself for seventeen years. It takes a while to establish that I do care. I promise. I’m just really bad at showing it. Maybe that’s the worst crime of all. I’ll slip love letters into birthday cards until someone reads over my shoulder and tells me it’s wrong. I’ll love ferociously until I’m reminded it’s too much. I’m a heart drawn in extremes. The strings inside are pulled tight until I swear to god I feel something in my chest snap and I slump over against the steering wheel.

Once, while a boy had his face buried in my neck, I wondered if I was broken. Completely unaffected.

A girl once said, ‘maybe I feel this way because it’s real love’

My heart broke because I knew I didn’t love her. I didn’t want to hurt her, I just couldn’t hang on to the idea that I’d surrender myself like that.

I didn’t understand myself. I could play the part, buy flowers and hold doors and remember dates. I just couldn’t. Feel. A. Damn. Thing.

I can’t remember what it felt like to think I was in love.

The sweet sea creatures, so black they devoured light, they lit fires on the inside of my skin. I tried to cut them out, stop the burning, but I was only left with red and the scent of burning flesh. I have a barcode of all my past lives encoded on the inside of both wrists. White lies and white lines cover most of my unseen body.

Sometimes I split into wisps, caught in currents and pulled from my skull. I watch my body sway like too much seaweed. I want to go home but this is where I’ve lived for so long that I’ve forgotten the taste of freshwater. Everything is hazy and too many colors that shouldn’t exist here. Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe I’m back at the kitchen table and the voice is my mothers and I’m not going anyplace nice there either.

Sycophantic smiles and a laugh like broken seashells, my monsters pull me apart. They tear a child from my chest and teach it how to cry softly. I am weeping for a person I’ll never know. They laugh louder. Tiny crystals hit the ocean floor and break into sand. My hands are cut with diamond. My hands are red and the ocean is so full of sharks.

Tall shadows throw themselves around like echoes. They shape themselves around me like a shield and then shrink. I am safe from all but the dark. It closes in and I am strangled by fishnets and intentions. I go blue in the face and beg to a god called Mercy, who has no ears or eyes.

My knees and elbows are sewn together, I go limp like a rag doll, hang over an armchair. I disappear into the white noise of this house. No one even knows I’m there.

I’ve given you the pieces of me, scattered bits of apprehension, told you how I feel about my friends. Asked you to listen. You were someone I trusted.

But I’ve forgotten how much time I’ve spent here, washed out and full of that small-scared feeling that you taught me. I don’t raise my voice. I don’t whisper. I don’t speak. I hide in bathrooms and mid-nights when I weep. You were someone I trusted.

You were someone who shaped me, taught me how to read people, gave me empathy. Taught me timidness and acquiescence. Told me my friends were liars and untrustworthy. You were someone I trusted.

You taught me how to tiptoe and fade into sidewalk chalk drawings. How to not be there but be there all the same. Never sit still, never be stupid, a dumb baby playing pretend. You told me I was unmotivated but gifted. You were someone I trusted.

i’ve forgotten my birthday. every happy day in the park with bubbles. out of the window falls the pages of those stories i never finished writing down. it feels so good to sink with them, fluttering slowly to my bedroom floor. i melt away like ice cream. i disappear.

My head is where I live.

My heart is filled with ghosts that float through walls and dissolve into shadows.

My head is an empty room.

My trauma lives there.

My heart is dissolving through my chest and I am a ghost.

My trauma is a ghost.

I am dissolving in an empty room.

My head is floating and my heart is drawn in shadows.

My empty room is flooded, I lie back and float, trauma is the water.

My heart is only full when your ghost lives there.

My head dissolves like a pill into the shadows.

My trauma dissolves like a pill in my heart.

My head is full of me and my ghosts.

The shadows are alive and they flood me, leaving my chest an empty room and rotting the floorboards.

I am a pill, dissolved on the tongues of strange ghosts.

My heart tells my head to make itself a shadow in an empty room