I like that when I'm up high I can see the city lights. The lights of downtown. They are symbolic lights, so distant. They remind me of my aspirations in life. They stand tall in the distance and beckon me to push forward.

Except recently the lights don't seem as strong. They flicker faintly and bleed into the blackness of night. So it's just me up here. Straining to see the skyline, but ultimately it just fades quicker.

It's nights like these when I worry if one day I'll be up here like this, staring desperately to the city, only to find the lights have faded completely. Leaving behind nothing but empty blackness.

It's like when your shoe is wet on a basketball court
You place all this pressure on your shoe and it skids just a little

She wraps herself in overcast skies
And buries her head in the mist
All of the vapor can't see that she cries
And they drown her to sleep with a kiss

Lost in the blanket of cloud she grows cold
Her warmth washed away in the rain
No thunder, no lightening, no sun, and no sound
A body is all that remains

I'm letting myself go
I eat like I am starving
I push the gym off to "study"
Hip bones being enveloped
By this self hatred
Spilling over my pants
I curse and scream
But the next minute I'm swallowing

I may have taught you to dance
To put yourself in the headlights
How to laugh and be seen
But you reminded me how to dream
How to love myself, let alone
How to love someone else
You are my first text good morning
My last text goodnight
You clothe yourself in humility
And you stare through fogged lens
Perhaps that's why only you
Can make me so happy, yet so angry
That someone as fluorescent as you
Cannot see the bright colors they emit
You call yourself grey
But I call you a painters palet
The world is a muddy muddy place
And it'd be that much harder to live
Without seeing your tracks in the dirt
You've taught me that as hard,
And as challenging life can be,
It's all worth the low melodic vibrations
That create a beautiful unified hum
And without your hum, and without mine
*The world would be that much quieter

My eyes sting as they sit glued to the screen of my phone and my thumbs robotically type out this poem

I need something real. Something tangible.

I squinch my nose up as the smell of **** plumes out of the truck my cousin hopped out of
Sitting in the back of her car, nauseous because of the smell and half car sick
We sit at a table half eating lunch, half staring at the walls,  only small talk
Once best friends able to spend weeks on end together, we've grown apart
Her interests in drugs and boys and things that trigger these rain clouds of thought push me away
I speed to Nana's, desperate for the familiar *****, warm feeling
My grown cousins greet me with empty hugs and greetings and the gap gets wider
I watch as their children run and scream and play and I am swept back to my own childhood
The old joy filled bike races and ***** games of hide and seek ripple faintly
I realize that I'm all grown up, that nothing I can do will transform me into the toddlers I watch playing in the yard
The feeling leaves me hollow inside, devoid of the wonder of childhood and struggling to fill the peculiarly shaped hole growing up has gouged into me
The further I go the wiser I get, and the more unhappy I become
I'm left confused as to how magical this place, these people were when I was so young
And how dull, and futile it's all now become with age.