When i left you,
I got so drunk i tried to hug my mom
but i hit my head on the kitchen counter instead.
My first problem
was that i tried to snake myself between her arms
instead of just asking for a hug.
It was almost like it was too easy,
too vulnerable of a question
but what's more vulnerable
than a drunk heart
with only soft flesh protecting it?
You are a  dull knife.
I wish you were sharper,
**** me with one wound,
but you have to keep trying to break through me.
This hurts a lot more than it would
if i were dead.

i. Am i everything you thought i'd be? I know i'm not much but i just really hope you liked me.
ii. I'm sorry i didn't answer you after you purposefully ignored my texts for 3 days after i tried to **** myself.
iii. How do you feel on the *******? Are you okay? Do you need me to do anything for you?
iv. Just please call me to warn me before you actually shoot him
v. I know. Park a half mile away. He'll never hear you coming.
vi. I wish you didn't miss either. Did he know it was you? Good.
vii. I think i might love you
viii. I'm sorry, i shouldn't have said that. Did i mess this up?
ix. I dreamt about you
ix. I write all my poetry about you
ix. Did you leave me again? I stopped wanting to hurt myself. I promise. Please come back. I'm better now. For you.
x. I feel empty on these meds. Please come lay with me. I need to feel something again.
xi. I'm so drunk that all i can think about is you. Everything is you.
xii. I miss you. I hope you're taking care of yourself.
xiii. I know it's 4 am. And you probably won't answer. But i just wanted you to know that i really care about you. I would've given you the whole world if you asked. I would've let you put that bullet in me. At least i know now that you wouldn't have missed

Sixteen
and taking my first sip of alcohol
and ******* DOES THIS TASTE.....
like absolute ****,
how the **** do you guys even drink this stuff?
Shots?
like from the doctors? Yeah I got all mine.
Oh you mean like, (makes shot-taking motion)
.....yep I'll have a few more drinks.
You said I'd feel better in 15 minutes
but it's been an hour and a half
and I guess I'm still waiting.
But I really hate sitting on this couch by myself
because I think I could actually be stuck here forever.

Eighteen
and it's the summer before my first year of college.
I'm sitting on my friend's back porch
killing a bottle of whiskey by myself
because I'm still waiting for those 15 minutes to go by
so I can feel better.
I now need more than one bottle
and my BAC has been at a consistent .15 for last three weeks
don't ask me how I got here.
Better yet,
don't ask me how I drove here.
I convinced myself that drowning my liver
was a lot better than drowning myself
but now I can't tell the difference
because I always feel like choking.
The same way the face made by my ex girlfriend did
when I said I had *** for the first time since her.
It was the same face I made
the first time I took a sip of whiskey without a mixer,
her face twisted together sour lemon
and I can only imagine the burning feeling she got in her throat.
But now I can drink whiskey just fine
and I'm sure she doesn't remember what I taste like either.

Three months into my first semester
I'm still waiting for those fifteen minutes
even though the clock says I've been awake for 34 hours straight.
At this point,
if I don't drink
my skin crawls with the bugs underneath of it
and I've started to wonder if I'll have to **** myself to make this stop.

Two days ago,
i found out how content i would be
if i died,
if my blood poured out broken faucet
and i turned soft clay
in a cocoon of metal,
glass littering the street
so God could see the reflection,
see where to pick me up at.
I imagine it like a taxi,
there's a price to pay
to get all the way to the gates,
it just depends on how much
you're willing to sacrifice.
I never knew salvation required negotiation.
But I guess it was the same way
I bargained my life with
emptying the canister of xanax
and lexapro;
counting them,
wondering how many it would take
to make people miss me.
I already missed me.
I haven't known what i feel like sober
in three years
even though i've stopped drinking.
I told myself i would rather be dead
than medicated,
but here i am,
three years intoxicated,
making love to whiskey bottles
with only the tips of my fingers.
They told me love is now
a fatal thing to put my tongue on,
but i think my lips would die for that.
My mouth waters at the thought.
Love used to be a half-drank box of wine,
the other 2.5 liters already crossed
the threshold of my stomach.
I know you said, "drink this
and you'll feel better in 15 minutes."
But I can't remember
how long it's been
since i've started feeling like this
and i'm not sure
if one more drink
or one more pill
will make this stop.
i'm not sure
if any of this was worth it.

Every week
I see two different psychologists.
They told me to define Recovery.
Doctors visits,
blue prescription pads,
handfuls of pills
putting medicine in me
hoping that i don't get sick.
Do i take them all at once?
My anxiety made me
rip the label off the bottle
because that's what i do when i get nervous
i tear things away and
maybe that's where you went
but Doc said
i had to take them to get better,
so why not say bottoms up?
face-up in a casket.
Wait.

They told me to define Addiction:
hands shaking from a clean blood stream,
need to feel *****,
match the fingerprints on the bottle
with the ones on my own throat;
trying to stop the substance
even though i made the choice
to swallow.
I am always swallowing,
a constant cycle of open throat
throwing liquor down the hatch
tossing a few pills back
just to hear the splash.
Is it six feet down?
Tell me how far my empty goes.
Wait.

They told me define Empty.
The hollow nothing disguised as a chest,
a bedroom after death,
my stomach on a good day,
your eyes after i told you i loved you
and my voicemail when you stopped calling.
I used to ignore your calls
so I could keep your voice tucked away
in the dark corners of my phone
but ever since you left
your voice has echoed off my walls,
turning plastic bag and i'm made infant
and i couldn't stop suffocating in your name
so now i sleep on the floor of my sisters room.
I would rather stay awake from her snores
than be haunted by a ghost
of someone who's still alive.
Wait.

Are you?
I haven't heard about you in a while,
I mean i know your friends said
you weren't doing too well.
I didn't think it was that serious.
You were never doing too well.

My psychologists told me define Regret.
Regret is never getting to apologize to the dead.
Regret is crying more last night
than I did at your funeral.
Regret is ***** after too much alcohol
and not enough prescription.
Regret is the burn marks that don't need cigarettes.
It is knowing I should have picked up
the last time you called.
Because you didn't leave a voicemail.
All you left was your voice.
Empty is the sound of your voice.
Addiction is the sound of your voice.
Recovery can never be the sound of your voice.
Regret is that it used to be.

Have you ever started hanging out with someone new only to begin wondering why you want to bathe in their shampoo and make poetry out of the way their eyebrows look?!
WELL NOT TO WORRY!
I have a few simple steps you can follow to destroy those feelings.

Step 1: Imagine your grandma's lips every time you feel compelled to kiss them! THIS is a surefire way to never want to look at them again. The embarrassment will hit you like a train. Unless you do like to kiss your grandma. In which case: (shrugs)

Step 2: Keep at least 3 feet of distance between you at all times. You will soon become obsessed with the inches between you instead of the warmth of their body on yours. If you get cold, buy a blanket.

Step 3: Leave yourself voicemails until your inbox gets full. That way, when you ignore their calls, you don't have to say "no" to their voice, only to their name on a screen. That's if you even want to respond them at all, because we all know the best way to get out of doing anything is to completely ignore the problem!

Step 4: When your friends start to ask where this person's been, tell them you don't know; even though you've been keeping tabs on their tweets to make sure they're still okay without you. Make up lies to tell your friends. Tell them they left you, so your friends will feel compelled to tell you how they were never good enough for you in the first place and that this will get easier with time. The truth is, that you don't want to talk about them again because their name adds to the clockwork ache of your stomach like you've been skipping meals since their absence.

Step 5: Stop making room for someone who's not coming, stop saving seats for imaginary bodies.

Step 6: Get rid of anything that reminds you of them; your favorite tshirt, the art piece they bought for you hanging above your head board. Matter of fact, get rid of the headboard too. Make your room even emptier without them. Don't let yourself remind you of them either because you'll have to get rid of that too. So start running, change the shape of your body so no one will fit next to you like they did. But just in case, maybe you should just keep running. Don't slow down for anyone.

Step 7: Give yourself a new name. It will get easier to hear from someone else in case they say your old name the way the person you're running from used to. Tell yourself that this is okay because you've been starting to feel like a stranger to yourself anyway.

Step 8: when the house in your chest starts burning down, leave your old self inside it, leave the memory of them inside it. You always talked about how romantic it would be to die together anyway. Wear your smoke drenched lungs like a medal of honor, let it hang from your neck like a noose that snapped from the weight even though you promise you stopped eating your meals without them.

Step 9: hold your own body close at night. Keep the pieces of youself pressed together tightly with your own palms. Don't let their broken ceramic promises crucify your hands, don't make a deity out of them if they're not the ones dying for your sins.

Step 10: Everything is in place. Stand in front of your mirror and try calling yourself by your old name. Recognize the foreign language leaking from your tongue, understand that you have turned yourself into an empty tomb, a massacre disguised as a new body. You never knew pain until this moment, placing your hand on the reflection in front of you knowing you can't even get through to yourself. Ask yourself, was this worth it?

I am working on filling the hollow ache of myself,
extracting the lonely with hands that do not belong to me.
You are my constant reminder of time,
my clockwork heartbeat ticking
with your helpful reassurance
that it is okay to have loose seams.
You pull me tight like boot strings,
placing my sole // soul by your bedside
and never at your back door.
I want to be where you place your feet in the morning,
carry you through your day,
never letting dirt get to your skin.
And if I someday fail to keep you safe from filth,
i will unclench my hands and wash you holy,
baptize you clean from my sins,
let me make a mess of only myself
and pray for your renewal.
Your sun kissed smile begs search of my happy,
reminds me to breathe,
tells me there is life in this oxygen.
You are water,
able to hold up my sinking ship
but still can slip through my fingers if I am not careful.
Your tide controlled by the moon,
is it a thrilled howl or a scream when you see it // me?
Either way my presence beckons quake from your throat
and I can only hope
that it will stay as sweet as the first time i met you.
The small tremble of vocal chords
as existence being born of your tongue;
you make words an easy thing,
can only threaten stutter
dare it to try and damage your speech.
You are smooth like tumbled sea glass,
turning thing handled by hands
into a pendant to wear around my neck;
wanting the world to see you,
never will I want to hide you in my back pocket.
They will ask where I found you,
such a beautiful treasure of body,
and I will tell them
that I did not have to go to the shore to find you,
that the shore found me,
and I was just lucky enough to witness the tide
unravel you into my hands
but it turns out
that I was the one enveloped
by you.

I told my therapist about you the last time i saw her.
She asked me about the time
when “no”
did not have definition,
only used as a syllable,
a filler word,
something to spice up things in the bedroom.

I told her I loved you.
That we had slept together
several times before it happened
and that for some reason
I still stayed with you after.
It happened in the early morning,
before my mind had any time
to wipe the sleep from its creases.
They say that’s best time to work out,
get up early and run
before the body knows what it’s getting itself into.
Maybe I should’ve started running
before my body made itself something
that you wanted to get into.

I haven’t stopped running since.
Dropping numbers on the scale
like my clumsy hands
turned pounds into soap bars
and my sweat made it harder hold on to.
Now my hip bones rub against my skin
in a competition with my ribs
to see who can break through first.

You used to say you liked the way
my edges didn’t feel like edges
but soft good mornings.
But I didn’t want to remind myself anymore
of your
good mornings
and my always mournings,
black sheets covering my face,
my body.
I am the widow at my own funeral
but nobody knew that I died that day.

I didn’t want an open casket,
I didn’t want open anything.
The space between my thighs
felt like valleys,
miles of emptiness
that you saw as potential,
and I only wanted them to be closed shut,
wired together, locked jaw,
I had nothing to say to you.

I didn’t cry when it was over,
when you rested your body on top of mine
laid your head in the crook of my neck
and whispered how much I meant to you.
I made pretend husband and wife,
made pretend love.

I told myself you loved me
that I should’ve been willing
to open myself armory,
a place to leave your weapons,
maybe that’s why I felt bombs in the pit of my stomach,
you felt my bones rattle under your hands
the aftershock of surprise explosions.
Every time you held me,
it was my anxiety
not love
that made me tremble for you,

You said
if you could wake up next to me every morning
you wouldn’t have to drink so much,
just swallow me.
But i promise
if i could
I would drown you,
drain you.
I wanted to leave you empty,
wanted to leave you
the way you left me,
digging my own grave
with hands crumbling
like broken heirlooms;
something that meant a lot to someone
a long time ago.
But it’s been 4 months
and i’m still picking shards of you
out of my skin,
you dug yourself
so deep into my flesh
that I thought you started to become part
of my DNA.
But like the wrong blood type,
my body rejected you
no matter how much I thought
I needed you to survive.

But here I am,
all splintered finger nails surviving,
turning demons into salt piles and burned bones,
forgetting what your name sounds like
when it rolls off my tongue,
forgetting why I ever thought
I needed you in the first place.