This poem is not about happiness. It is not about the butterflies in your stomach or the stars in your head. Finding money on the ground, or being told you’re beautiful. It is NOT about loving someone until they feel as expensive as the things you could never afford. And it is CERTAINLY not about being loved until your blood acts as super glue and mends the parts of your body and mind where disaster struck, so the sunshine is permanently inside you, and the super glue doesn’t let the storm water in when it rains. This poem is not about sadness. It is not about constantly feeling like you’re breathing underwater, swallowing mouthfuls until your surrender and drown. Waking up and feeling okay for a split second, until the realization hits you like lightning and you’re the storm. Feeling your heart pulverized by the one person you trusted to even touch it. No. This is about nothing. And not the peaceful kind of nothing, where your mind is empty in the good way, in the way that you feel weightless. This is for the kids that lay in their bathtubs with their noses just above water because they have nothing to drown for, or live for. This is about staying awake all night and dreaming about how satisfyingly imperfect it would be to cry yourself to sleep, because then at least they’d be able to feel something. This is about wanted physical pain, as twisted as that sounds, because your body is so numb. When your mind is so far up in the sky, yet the fires of hell burn the lining, you dream about being knocked down into the dirt, because then you would have scrapes on your knees to show for it. This is for the kids that, when someone asks them how they are, genuinely have NO idea of what their mental state is. Unstable. Unstable yet stuck in the monotonous routine of waking up to go back to sleep. Because dreaming is better than reality, because emotion might come. Because sometimes feeling isn’t bad when you’re so used to an empty stomach and hollow bones and a mind that can hear the echoes of its own voice.