I want you to imagine fixing a watch, all the tiny little parts
And I want you to imagine fixing a watch with broken hands
An overly involved metaphor for the idea that you can’t fix someone else when you yourself are broken

I fell in love with this image of drugs and ***** and rock and roll
And the reckless way you lived your life despite the fragility
When I found myself broken I spent years picking up shards of glass and trying to put them back together
You swallowed yours with a bottle of whiskey and marched on

I think you’ve always seen me as someone who could fix you
I’ve never been able to do that
And that’s why you come back whenever you feel like killing yourself or you’ve finally decided that you want someone to come home to that doesn’t live inside a bottle

I’m still picking up glass
I wish I could love you enough to fix you
But I won’t ever be waiting for you at home
There’s too much glass
There’s not enough time

Even if I could find a way to go back and fix that watch I can’t use it to turn back time
We’re here right now
And my hands are broken
Everything is

My hands have a mind of their own
Melt down all my doubts to fill molds of jail cell bars
Of locks with no keys
I’ve built a cage around my heart made of all the things you hate about me and the things I hate about myself
I know the weight of living is heavy love
Place it on my chest until my lungs cave in
I’ll find air in the spaces between our fingers and in the distance I’ve put between us

My minds become a road map full of roundabouts
From an aerial view you can see the loops of my neural pathways
They look a lot like “I’m sorry”
Made of dead ends and clovers and things my therapist says are out of my control
It goes around and around and around on repeat
But I’ll apologize again anyway even if it keeps you here longer than you wanted
In the maze
In the cage

Ive met people with keys
I don’t know how to ask for them
Even just for a second

Ask me about my past
I'll unstitch every seam
Tear everything out and lay it all on the table
A scrapbook pulled from a house fire
I'll romanticize every bruise
I'm interesting

Ask me how I've made it this far
I'll show you every "I'm fine"
How I've welded it into an armor I can't take off
I'll turn every "I wish you were never born" into the reason you fall in love with me
I'm a liar

Don't ask me who I am
I'll try to tell you something from the heart, I will
But if you close the scrapbook and look up
You'll see that there's nothing left
I'll try to be something I'm not for you

But I'm nothing

One small step for literally ******* anyone else
One large step for you
The depressed
The first real trip you’ve made outside your room in six days
Not really used to how the gravity feels when you’re standing on two feet
The terrain foreign
Things change when you aren’t aware
Surrounded by those spots you see when you go out in the sunshine for the first time in a long time
You can almost pretend they’re stars

You told him how hands on your body make you feel like you're 18 again
The word no coating you like tissue paper armor in a thunderstorm

You told him how you stayed
Because you can't accuse someone of breaking and entering if you forgot to lock all the windows

You told him how one of the last firsts you had was torn away like old wallpaper in a house you weren't ready to remodel

He let himself in one day when your guard was down
And trust grew like dandelions
Wild and uninhibited  

And it's hard to tell which hurt worse
Being broken into
Or letting him in
Allowing him to tour your wounds like a museum
And adding his work to the exhibit before leaving