He tells me that cliche again about van gogh and his yellow paint. He says i’m an artist like that. i’ll find my yellow paint. my salvation. how i scoop out hope.
i want to tell him i already have. the ugly things i shove inside myself trying to find happiness even if it kills me. my yellow paint has been entire cakes, has been sixteen shots, has been strangers i kissed and forgot, has been eating too healthy, has been eating nothing at all, has been dark nights i swaddled myself in, has been speeding on black ice, has been everything i could think of that would make me feel anything at all for once in my life. i wonder if i die like this they’ll say it was beautiful. they’ll talk about the poet who used the sharpest things in her life to carve the joy out of herself - they’ll say, oh, she knew it was toxic but she wanted to put the happiness inside of her again. she ate only captain crunch because it reminded her of her childhood, isn’t that so cute? well obviously it’s sad she’s dead but how romantic is it that she loved birds and flowers and once debated eating poison. how will they paint my ending. she unbuckled herself on highways because she wanted to be one with the sky. she refused to look before crossing the road because she believed in fate. she was a wonderful girl and will be missed while we wear socks with her face on them. van gogh ate yellow paint. we say he was trying to put the good back into him. but i’ve slammed myself against the ground trying to get death to stick. i know what self harm is when i see it.

girl like: can recite digits of pi up to number 25. got a mouth full of razors but will find a way to speak around them so she can spit out the answers to last night’s math problems. girl like: walking around with one million useless facts that will never save her life and one million useless feel-good quotes about yoga which won’t save her life neither, girl like: need her on our classroom jeopardy team but don't need her for much else unless we need somebody to stand in the middle of the room and just scream
girl like: you kissed her on a night where she got drunk for the first time and you were the whole bottle of fireball but nobody pulled her away from you because when girl like this parties, people think it’s funny that she has no sense of danger
girl like: walking on glass, girl like balancing act, girl like “it’s easy if you understand weight distribution,” girl handling a crime scene easy because the one in her left temple is sort of sloshing around and spreading past the edges and one of these days she’s gonna have to deal with it in some other way rather than “the angle of the bloodspatter shows the angle of the assault” rather than “i’m fine i’m just tired” rather than “sure i’ll help you study for the final” rather than being in the backseat of her mother’s minivan and silently weeping without anyone seeing and for reasons she can’t quite put a finger on 
girl like: she apologizes because this area her body is a building in renovation so the appearance is unsightly and truth be told she has no idea if she’s going to tear it down or build it up but the mystery is sort of exciting isn’t it - and you’re trying to scrape her off the ground with your eyebrows in that little knot people get when they’re upset but don’t know really how to fix it and she keeps running and she says: listen, the specific heat of wood is pretty high, you know. her feet are burning, nevermind her soul
girl like: science is amazing isn’t it don’t you know objects in motion tend to keep speeding towards a brick wall and i’ve shot myself out of the barrel of a gun wanna see the angle of the bloodspatter wanna walk across the coals wanna stick your fingers in the glass of my brain wanna turn up the music so nobody hears the stitches coming undone darling i’m sorry i’m not savable we’ve tried everything darling i’m sorry i come off like i’ve got everything in between my fingers but darling being up-to-date on my homework doesn’t make me strong being good at hiding it doesn’t make me the voice of success being able to laugh when my brain is a mess just makes me sad it doesn’t make me a hero
girl like: my favorite digit of pi happens to be zero.

You make love taste rotten, like something that has been sitting out on the sidewalk underneath the afternoon sun. People like you only know how to love yourself and take more than you give. People like you love storms, ravaging the homes others have constructed, leaving nothing behind. You turn something wonderful into something I wish I never had. To you, love must mean Winning, must mean always being right, must mean crushing the person that I am just so you can build your ego a little higher. To you, I must look like a fight, a competitor, a challenge to defeat. You use your words and threats to make me forget that I am a vital part of the relationship, your kisses fall like duct tape on my lips, you don't let me be anything but yours. Yours to love, hurt, twist, break, yours to keep, own, manipulate. I know it is wrong to love someone like you. But that is why things like this are hard- you fall in love with oceans before you realize how easy it is for them to drown you, you fall in love with people before you see how even seemingly best of them can abuse you.