I ****** up.
I mean like I really ****** it up this time.
I don’t know what I said wrong
But
I’m sorry.
I’d pray you aren’t mad at me
If I believed in a god.
But I don’t
So I just look for people to blame and
Oh look!
I choose myself.
God.
This is the worst.
I’m going to be alone forever.

Oh.
Never mind.
He texted back

So I have this reoccurring dream where
I rush to my childhood home and
Open my bedroom door, immediately hit with the familiarity of the smell of day old crackers masked by Febreze.
My eyes search to find a cage full of rats.
I have never owned a rat.
Yet, there are about 20 of the fuzzy little guys
Gnawing at the bars of the cage, pink paws grabbing and clutching, exasperated squeaks escaping their mouths as if to say “Help me!” or “Welcome home!”, my subconscious isn’t smart enough to clarify which.
I open the cage,
A few of them are dead.
Stiff. Small. Dead.
Instead of waiting to mourn
I quickly scoop up the others in my arms
Cuddling them close.
The scenery changes to a pirate ship in the way that dreams do.
Slowly and in a way that sort of makes you dizzy but your dream self doesn’t even notice and it only starts to mess you up when you’re thinking about it while eating Froot Loops two days later.
The rats are afraid and hurry out of my arms
I desperately try to scramble them up
But one by one they all fall overboard.

Now, I aced AP Psychology, so I know how to interpret this
There are 3 theories on dreams.
Information processing theory says dreams sort, sift, and fix a day's experience into memories.
I don’t remember losing my precious rats on a pirate ship.
So that isn’t it.

Problem solving theory says dreams are the continuity of waking thought but without the constraints of logic or realism. That dreams are meant for solving your problems. It suggests my rats are metaphors. I love rats, and if rats are problems, what does that say about me? That I keep trying to hold my issues and insecurities close to me but can’t juggle them all? That all my chances keep falling and dying and I’m losing my sense of self. That I need a reason to be the victim in every situation so I will never have to take responsibility for my actions and I can pretend like my faults never happened. And what about the pirate ship? Like, I don’t even like pirates so why would I put myself in a place I hate and then cling to disgusting faults like they’re precious. None of this makes sense, except maybe it does and I refuse to admit it, I’m in denial, I don’t want to get better I want to stay in this awful cycle forever.

But activation synthesis theory says dreams are a product of activity in the brain. The cerebral cortex attempts to make sense of neural firings by creating a story. In other words, dreams have no meaning. So this whole poem.
Is worthless.

As worthless as a rat.
A small. Fuzzy. Loving.
Yet short-lived rat.

Mother warned me not to be too absorbed
In the mirror. I need to instead pay attention
To the world around me. “To form an identity,
One needs not to worry about perfection.”
She said. But, mother, you are apathetic
If I am anything but. I calm my impulses.

I buy and obsess over material possessions by impulse.
Catch me with a teen magazine, completely absorbed
As I block out the real world with an apathetic
Attitude. As I sit and read, I pay attention
To the celebrities who demonstrate perfection.
I will copy their traits to form my identity.

Lost in this dreary world, searching for identity,
I collect people’s personalities, stealing them on impulse.
Searching for happiness coincides with the pursuit of perfection.
I laugh at those who say I am self absorbed,
That say I am only looking for attention,
When it comes to criticism, I am apathetic.

I don’t care that I come off as apathetic.
It just happens to be part of my identity.
I don’t do it for attention.
Or maybe I do? I’m too impulsive.
I’m only this way because I’m self absorbed.
Obsessed with the idea of perfection.

I look at myself and all I see is perfection.
Others may see me with nothing but apathetic
Stares, but they are simply too absorbed
With their own problems of their identities.
Not my fault that they don’t feel the impulse
To love me. I don’t need their petty attention.

That was a lie, I live for attention.
Can’t everyone see I am the human embodiment of perfection?
Without their validation, I may act on my impulses.
And then when they ask why I did it, I will be too apathetic
To care. Dangerous and beautiful is my identity.
It isn’t so bad to be self absorbed.

I am absorbed in myself, desperate for attention
My identity relies solely on the thought of perfection
I am only apathetic because I care too much about myself. Here they come again, the impulses

What do you want from me?
Borderline personality disorder, why have you chosen me?
Have I not suffered enough in this pitiful life?
All I ask is to have a stable identity and sense of self
But you come creeping into my development and overtake
Labels are nothing
Labels are everything
No in between with anything,
Black and white thinking
Love or hate
Mania or depression
In the span of 5 minutes.
The only constant you allow me to feel is my hatred for you.
Every moment is a swirling vortex of losing hope and
Clinging to anyone who so much as smiles in my direction
But I suppose
When everything is switching
Faster than a traffic light
Because of you.
The thing to be most thankful for
Is to be able to hold onto you.
Borderline personality disorder, why have you chosen me?
My only sense of self, since you change everything else

A wind chime old and rusting on your grandmother’s porch
The song not as clear as it once was
The new tune so softly eerie that to a passerby it seems just fine

Waking up five minutes before your alarm
Sitting on your bed, wide awake
Just watching the time tick pass, minutes of your life
Until you’re past the time to go

In the idle of traffic, you become aware
Of all the movement around you
Babies whine, horns honk, people sing
Yet here you are
What are you doing?
Are you doing anything at all?

Your bed is a coffin, dusty from the days you don’t open it at all
The sunlight is foreign to your eyes
People prance around you, basking in its glory
They don’t even blink at your inability to see the light.

In the cemetery,
Gravestones surround you,
Bodies of the lost and souls of the ******
You can’t help but resonate somewhere deep inside your soul.
Not that you wish to be dead, no.
Just that it seems you already are.

Rushing through never seemed so lovely
Do I have to do this again?
How much time until it ends?
Phase through the routine and
Put up with the words spat in your face like venom
Who can blame you for being lazy?
It isn’t laziness making you this way
This is a universal feeling that no one knows how to explain
A lot of people don’t even know it’s there
Like
A poison slowly seeping into the gases we breathe
So subtle we barely even notice as it overtakes us
Controls us
But we are all under the veil of a lie that this is just how we are
Maybe it isn’t this day making us all mindless robots
Maybe it isn’t just enhancing our already full glass of depression
Maybe it’s ******* away at the energy of before
And maybe it’s doing nothing at all.
Since time is a concept, we just all search for things to blame for our own faults
Are we doing the same with this?
We have so much to look forward to.
That’s all we truly care about.

A self centered shallow cry for excitement that we buzz through what we could also be making exciting
We treat this day like a ghost fogging up our glasses when it is truly an opportunity smacked down into the middle of it all.
We all need a break, yes.
But what are we really taking a break from?

Three in the afternoon and everything is fuzzy
You feel the familiar prickling under your skin and welcome it with open arms
But you can’t feel your arms
This vessel isn’t your body
But at the same time it is
You’re watching yourself lay there hopelessly while you pray and scream And cry
Oh, God, please don’t let me die.

But you aren’t dead
But are you even alive?
A bittersweet medium where nothing is real and your chest is on fire
You live in the flames, you feel yourself escape the trap of gravity
And you are floating
The bed you lay on is no longer touching you
You are in the air, weightless, but only for a few moments before
You crash down to earth and farther
And farther down more
Falling into endless
Painless
Void.

Am I alone?
Am I real?
Words ramble off the tongues of a homely face
But the words got mixed up in Google translate
Foreign words ringing in your ears and you can’t tell if
If you are really experiencing everything you are
Or if you’re just playing make believe with yourself.

Back to nothing.
Always everything but.