She's got a bit of understanding of me in her pocket, though she's never treated me like Margo Roth Spiegelman or Alaska Young, but I so appreciate that she knows I am not ordinary either. She won't ever know the ways that I love her for loving me when I fall short. Over time, maybe I can make her understand that I spent three years being treated like a normal girl, my broken shards swept aside and the rest of myself glossed over with a simple layer of facade and denial, and I embraced it, and it took something from me quite incredibly devastating. I spent my growing up years being treated like there was no hope for me. But she loves my heart, knowing all it's debilitating flaws. Though I was once some terrible, selfish child, she loved me through it. I am miraculously confident that even one day when she comes to know how much strength it took to learn to speak on the phone without wanting to cry, and that I still have a lot of trouble looking other humans in the eye, and almost every day, I smoke cigarettes and listen to loud music until I give myself headaches, and I just really don't care... I believe she will still love me. She doesn't see me as weak as I see myself. I hope she knows I call her angel because looking back now, I know she's saved me a hundred times over. While I'm not quite sure yet how to exist in a love like this, the way love should have always been, I am eternally grateful.

Leaving cigarette ashes all up and down I-40 for nearly 900 miles. I just got done breathing you in enough to last me for 31 days and all I want is to go back to sleep in the curve of your body. I can't help but feel this drive would go much faster if you were in the seat to my right, but I'll keep barreling down this road, alone, headed home, but I'm not sure I can call it that it that, because no one there understands that I didn't take my heart with me when I pulled out of the hotel parking lot, and I'll never know the right words to explain why  I am so low when I return with the smell of your embrace still on my clothes, and I can still feel your flesh burning fresh in my mind. And I know that my mother is worried about my heart but I can't figure out how to make her realize that this is different, this is it, you're it, you're mine, you are my future. And I know better than anyone that you were always meant for me. Distance is not for the untrue love. The truth is, angel, I am feeling again and that is because of you. I feel every moment I am not next to you and, oh God, how I feel every second in your arms. Darling, I want you to know how much I hate the space between us. At least as I head back to Carolina, I know I'll be searching for a place we can hide away together. I can feel the miles growing and hurting but I also know that we can be strong through them and through the time we're missing. You are my whole heart, you are my girl, my world, forever.

I'm trying really hard to be okay with what's been done to me
I feel more okay when I can do the things it takes to be okay
I feel more than okay when I'm going 100 miles an hour down the road I grew up on
I'd feel ******* great if I could destroy my body a little bit more
That's all I want
I just want to be okay
I want to forget

every single time
i falter and stumble around
it's like i can feel a stopwatch resetting.
"it's been zero days since my last mistake"
it's like that timer needs to get somewhere
somewhere specific
before i can really begin.
it might never get there,
i might never be stable enough to satisfy
and i can't be okay with that
because who wants a "zero days" kind of girl as a wife?
that girl shouldn't be a mother, for certain.
that type of child will never reach responsibility
stability
to have the life she wants.
the clock goes back to midnight
stopwatch to zero
i won't begin until i can stop
doing all of these things that spin me in circles
and let me fall down
down
down.

When someone goes missing from your life, the clock slows to some kind of impossible speed where you're sure no time is actually passing at all.
Somehow, painfully and miraculously, it's been six days. But, still, you feel they've been gone a million years.
And you would give anything if they could just be here in this, any, and every moment with you.
You're craving them like they were a drug and now you're washed out, you can try to have a good time with anyone else but your best times are to be had roughly 850 miles away, or in the future, or five nights ago.

I'm dreaming of having no where to go
having no one to be
or maybe if I could just go back
and try being me again
but the me where nothing bad happens
I'm never hurt or forgotten or abandoned
that's the dream

the first day was hard and the fourth day was harder, this week has been the longest of my life.
i desperately want to dive back into our week together,
let's just relive it and we'll
sleep and drink everything else away.
i'll go to bed tonight and dream again of a time that is too far away
where I never tell you goodbye again. just goodnight.