Wearing long sleeves to cover bruised arms
And deleting text messages before bed every night
so my mom wouldn’t see what he was saying
Boys are mean to you if they like you
Boys are really mean to you if they love you
For him, love and hate were two horns on the same bull,
And a lot of the time, he would get the two sides confused
I spent a lot of time Anxiously waiting for his arrival home from school
Tapping pencils on my desk during class
Hoping the clock would just stop moving
I lost many things that semester
My friends, my sanity, 20lbs
I was a book people judged by the cover
Things seemed to be fine
I was fine
I was fine
Never letting anyone else all the way in
It’s hard to ask for help when you don’t know if you need it
It’s harder when you need help, but your scared to ask for it
People accused me of making things worse than they really were,
No one believed me when he drove to my house in the middle of the night
and threatened me until I finally got in his car.
He screamed profanities in my face
And when I went to open the door at a red light, he grabbed my arm
Burning fingerprints into my skin
A lot can change in 4 years
I’ve learned in my lifetime that hurt people are usually the ones
who hurt other people
Hurt people are also the ones that can help people.
Love and hate are two horns on the same bull.
But somewhere along the line
Hate turned into forgiveness
And love grew stronger
And I grew stronger
I realized someone who loves you, will love every part of you. They won't add scars to your body, or heaviness to your heart.

You have dreams of big cities and fancy cars and you are surrounded by beautiful people
But your ship is drowning
You've been on this voyage for 18 years now and you've come farther than you ever thought you would have but you will come up alittle short
Just as always
You have such big dreams but larger deadly habits
The razors won't help you and you know that but
Somewhere in your head you have convinced yourself that if you drain out all your blood you will also drain out all the hate and be lighter than ever and then you can finally make it to shore
But, my dear, the hate is not in your blood it is in your head
You are the captain of this sinking ship but your depression is your first mate
Your depression has been the evil stowaway that has been sleeping in your brain for years now
The hate in your head can be traced back to it
You've spent the last eighteen years trying to track its every move
You've performed countless operation on yourself trying to make yourself better trying to remove your depression
You would have thought you were van gogh trying to paint the perfect smile on your face because you know people say smiles can cure depression but i guess you just didn't try hard enough or maybe you should have ate yellow paint instead
But no matter how you decorate the ship it is still sinking

"The problem with suicide is that when it becomes an option in your mind, it's always an option."

My dad has always wanted me to write more happy poems, but joy has never rolled off my tongue as eloquently as sorrow.
I tried to sit down the other day and write a poem about the before. But after hours of searching my brain, I realized that I don't remember my body as anything other than the desolate, war-torn site it currently is.
I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment the switch was flipped. Go back to the day I woke up unhappy and force myself to go back to bed. I wish I could rewrite history and completely erase the first time I skipped a meal. I'd throw all the laxatives in the garbage. I never would have bought my first razor blade. Or my second. Or my third. I wouldn't have gotten sent to the hospital.

I guess it's true what they say about hindsight being 20/20. It's so much easier for me to look back on it, knowing what I know now.
I know that people didn't suddenly love me more just because I was less to take in. And scars are permanent; they don't fade just because the feelings attached to them do. I also realize that the only thing the hospital stay did was make me more of a burden to my family.

I'd love to tell 10 year old Briauna all this before she has to face it on her own, but why would she believe me? I wouldn't want to believe me either. Who would want to go watch a movie, when all the reviews rated it a waste of time?

So if I were to go back into the past, I'd focus on telling my younger self about the rebirth rather than the wreckage. I would tell her that tattoos will someday take the place of self-inflicted scars. That this time around there was a beauty behind the pain. That one day she will relearn what it means to eat whenever she's hungry and not stop until she's full. I'd tell her that nothing good ever came from being empty. I'd talk about how she adores others blindly and never lets her passion be dimmed. I'd tell her not to stress when the urge to claw her skin off remains well into recovered territory because she gets better at remembering to trim her nails.

I'd say baby girl I know you can get through this because I'm standing right here.

We'll get through this.
We're getting through this.
We got through this.

I haven't seen my therapists in months
& everyone assumes that's a good thing.

I seem happier
& everyone thinks that I'm getting better.

I'm writing again
& everyone says writing is a healer.

They forget that therapists & medicine is for those who can still be helped. That being content is one of the final steps in ending your life.

My poetry is my suicide note and I'm writing again.