Once when I was young,* I was told you could swing so high you'd be able to just *fly away.  

   I learned early on
               That not everything we're told is true
               The fantastical can sometimes amount to a pile of plastic bags scattered in the wind
                    The end isn't always happy and there's not always closure
      Punctuations are more often question marks than definitive periods
                And looking for a definite explanation took prevalence over allowing our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
         Play time was replaced with study time,
             And before we knew it, it was time for work
                      We strayed from the playgrounds of our youth,
      Never returning to the top of the slide, we'd hit the ground a bit too hard to keep the enchantment of seemingly endless possibilities going
                                              Carriages became pumpkins long before midnight,
              And the school bell rang before we could finish our fun
                       But to tell the truth, sometimes,
     When everyone else has gone inside, back to the real world, full of logic and banalities,
         I sit on the old swingset kicking my feet
    Hoping it will let me *soar

I used to pass love notes to the knuckles that cracked against my jaw.
I tucked inside my locket the bruises I thought no one else saw.
You see when your first love is pain,
Being covered in blood
Replaces kissing in the rain.
The last time a lover hit me I was 11,
So by 12 I had started dreaming up ways to get to heaven.
Depression is just a side effect of wanting to die,
But when you're in love with toxicity,
It can be hard to say goodbye.

I'm an addict,
To everything that hurts:
Bruises,
And bulimia,
Men who chase teenage skirts,
But hating myself was the only obsession
That lasted long enough to work.

You see I don't always want to die anymore,
Yet now I feel like I finally lost my mind.
Desperately seeking new ways to pass the time:
Anorexia holds my attention
Until trichotillomania comes
And then moves along,
And once again I'm boring and bored,
But I always swore
a genuine smile was something I'd want.

June will kiss you and tell you that you’re beautiful,
July will ******* senseless and leave you with a bleeding heart,
August will try to put your broken pieces back together only to get cut and leave you still broken,
September will bruise you and ask you why you’re still crying on the floor,
January  will snap  you in half and  later kiss your scars but only ends up cutting you deeper,
February will be an ocean of self destruction, washing over you and gently cradling you in it’s arms,
March is broken records all over your apartment floor and driving to the liquor store at 4 am,
April is blood in the sink, crying yourself to sleep, shaky hands and breaking down every time you hear his name,
May is a storm forming in your eyes when you realize that you need to save yourself and when you stopped loving yourself, they stopped loving you too, when they tell you that wounds will heal, you know that you’re never going to forget.
All you wanted was to hear the words ‘i’m never going to leave you’

I wish for the wonder in your eyes to manifest into something greater than you may realize. I feel cold, as if my heart is freezing and that iciness is slowly consuming my whole being. Sometimes i feel so small, a microscope would have trouble finding anything, except my fears. I have been feeling less than inspired to write to you as of late, but I still feel like I need to. Last night I ****** someone else; I just thought you should know. Gosh I loved you- And it’s been a while since your lips touched mine and i miss you. I loved you, and i know i keep saying that, and please trust me when i say this, I am not trying to get you back, it’s just I learned that if someone isn’t smart enough to want to be loved they don’t deserve it, and now you don’t have me anymore. I’m still in the process of burning those wretched bridges; still healing. sometimes I just want to talk to you, because I know you’re just there, like you said you were. Tonight I choose to write to you because I miss you and I’ve forgotten what it felt like to want to tear myself open myself for you and show you my broken world. I wish I still know how it feels to want to look at you and your beautiful hands. I wish I still know how it feels to want to see you again, how it feels to talk to you and hear your voice over the line because I liked it. I didn’t care less about your baggage or whatever you had, I just wanted all of you. Broken heart and all. Even if it was wrong. Because I felt like it was beautiful. You were beautiful.

Don’t promise me forever
i know you’re not going to stay,
one day my shaky hands and broken pieces will push you away
and you will get tired
and when you leave,
take every word you kissed on my skin,
nights i cried on the bathroom floor while you held me,
take back every single poem, every single scar you left on my skin where you touched.
Take back all those sweet words you whispered in the crook of my neck while our fingers interlocked and your warmth started to thaw my frozen chest,
take back all the drunken ‘i love you’s’
take it all with you because i know you’re spitting those same words down another girl’s throat

you were beautiful you’re like a living breathing sunrise. I loved you immensely. But, I looked at you but there was no fire
I talked to you but there was no conversation
I lay next to you but there was no desire
I kissed you but there was no spark
I looked in your eyes and they said you had lost interest.
And i know you said you would never leave me but it’s been 4 months and you love him.
You love him.
Nights of trying to find remedies for sadness included chain smoking on the roof until i coughed so hard i could feel my heart in my throat spending hours in the shower trying to cut your touch out of my skin
Wide awake at 4 am wishing i would be yours forever, but baby that’s not how things work anymore.