Why are your hands like the ocean?
Pull in, push out.
Come here, go away.

You learned to cry quietly because it's prettier that way. You hate that your cheeks get red- like transparent ghosts found a way to put handprints on porcelain skin. You wipe your tears before they touch your cheeks. Don't give any clues that you're breaking.

Remember the first time your mother told you to not look directly into the sun? You asked why and she just laughed. "You'll burn your eyes, silly girl." You remember this conversation each time she calls you her sunshine.

You were nineteen the day you were told, "you're so soft." It was the twenty-ninth time someone had told you this, but this time those words were coupled with soft eyes instead of a hard-pressed stare. Maybe you could have loved him. But falling in love meant jumping, and there were sharp rocks at the bottom.

You jumped once before. You jumped and swallowed seawater as you watched him standing on the bank scrubbing your poetry off of his hands. You remember water setting fire to the air inside your lungs as you realized that no matter how hard you screamed for him to just love you again, he'd only whisper, "you're just too broken."

You remember two months later- the first time hearing the pop of an orange pill bottle lid thinking that maybe you should write the time- like you're calling the last time you'd really be you. It was a "first kiss, first dance, missed call, last chance, yes, no, maybe-so" kind of night. The kind of night that puts your soul on a sinking boat in the middle of the ocean. There's no coming back from that kind of lonely.

"Be good." She told you. You remember this when you go to type "food" in a text and your phone corrects it to "good". Your ribs drop off into an empty abyss. There is no fulfillment to the kind of starvation your hands feel when you reach out to hands that will never love you back.

Those bones hold you enough for you to sit upright in a hospital waiting room. Spine straight and lungs held in a panic. This happens every time they put cold hands on the parts of you that no longer work. New mothers tell you that children are a blessing- that they'll change your life for the better. Hollow eyes meet the baby blues of another and your hands grow heavy with longing as you realize that your junk really is just junk and you'll never hold tiny hands.

You wonder why you miss someone from years ago. You wonder why it is that you cannot remember what their voice sounds like but you can remember what it smelled like outside the day you two met. The last time you picked up a phone, your hands knew to dial their number. But you haven't called in ages now. You quietly realize that you only miss certain people when your body becomes medicine cabinet.

You now know that you have hands like the ocean because people may love you, but no one wants to stay on the beach after the sun sets.

You remember turning the mirror around and telling you mother the sun didn't shine that day.

The endless nights where you and your friends spend hours talking are above average.
People pass you by on the street, but the one stranger to compliment you is above average.
The feeling of accomplishing something is above average.
Your life is above average.
Don't treat yourself as if you were an average joe because I promise you your not.
There is greatness in this world that you have yet to achieve and find, don't label yourself as average when you have not reached your full potential.
When all has failed you still have yourself.
You are the most important person in your life, if you haven't realized that then I hope you do some day.
Sometimes you may hate yourself and that's an average feeling, but that is not all of you.
You write the thought prescriptions for your brain, that's average but what you make out of it isn't.
The way you smile and laugh at weird things that you like isn't average, it's you.
You're, you.
Even if you still believe that you are the average joe or if you want to be the average joe, you may never achieve it.
You are unique.
A minuscule part of you is average,
that doesn't make all of you that way...

Depression. Oh malicious depression.
Always there, never fading away, or going away in this case.
Coming at me like she's my first priority.
Staying in my life because I guess I like the company, the feeling like there's always a weight on my shoulders, always a reassurance that I'm definitely not going to be in the mood for anything besides sleep and sometimes not even that.
Depression is my side chick, not only because I need some difference in my brain, some pizazz to keep things spiced up, or spiced down, but because my brain needs some company while the main chick happiness is away.
My side chick goes away sometimes when the main is in town.
While happiness is with me I'm always scared because what if depression finds out and comes to win me with pure determination.
So I ditch happiness...
Depression gets total control over me and I can't seem to find hope of ditching her and finding someone like happiness again.
Depression finds the time to insert unwanted thoughts into my brain, talk to me like I'm some slave to it, I guess I am in a way.
She's inconsistent in her time with me,
I talk to happiness still to fill in the times when depression isn't there, it's not the same with her.
Sure we're close and spend time together, but happiness is never really there with me like she was prior to depression.
Depression is jealous that I spend time with happiness, but I can't help it.
Happiness will always have a place in my brain.
Unlike depression happiness has been there since the beginning.
Depression came along for the attention a couple years ago and now we're in a relationship that only goes one way.
Depression loves me, I definitely do not love depression.
I hang on to depression since she's all I have left...
Happiness is at the back of my mind constantly wanting to be set free from my thoughts.
I just can't let go,
Can't let go of the feeling happiness gave me, can't let go of the love she gave and still gives to me as a far off friend.
You see happiness found relationships in the people around me, she is constantly prominent in their lives, they never fail to give her attention, treat her like the priority in their lives.
I miss happiness, she was great...
Now I have the ***** called depression and she's not leaving anytime soon, so I sit with her, attempt to love her and fail miserably at doing so.
I try and tell her that I don't want her anymore but she keeps coming at me with kindness and affection.
So now I just sit with her and happiness is held in the back of my mind slowly fading away and depression is now my partial past my entire present and most likely to be future.

People ask why I'm so tired when it's around the time of 10 in the morning.
I say that it's because I just couldn't sleep...
That's only partially true, because late in the evening what I think about is blue, actually it isn't that color but this is what people say I'm like when I feel this way.
Late in the evening my life is being clouded by the blue that people say is the true color of sadness.
My sadness doesn't have a true color it's a tie dye of all my old memories because it seems like they don't exist anymore. All it seems like anymore is the grey tint of the skin around my eyes when I look into the mirror.
Late in the evening my sadness is an illness that makes my whole body ache, it's like an earthquake went through my heart and the waves of destruction afterwards never went away.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that late in the evening I'm just hoping that the tie dye of my memories will slowly fade away and become the echoes of my sadness that would not be surrounding me any longer, but I guess for now I will just have to wait.

My life is now a constant fear of being near to the thing inside my skull called a brain.
My depression has gone from me being comfortable with it to me avoiding my inner feelings like a plague.
Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad. Sad. Sad..
Trying to escape the fear of the thing inside my skull called a brain is nearly impossible, but you can call up a doctor and hope that the miracle medicine balances out the chemical imbalance in the the thing inside your skull.
I just guess I'll have to pull back the layers of trauma and go down to what's really affecting me.
Failure.
Failure is not the thing inside my skull, it's just a production put on by it. Yet it still strikes fear into the organs inside my rib cage sending them into overdrive.

"The worst emotion to feel for me to feel would be happiness."
Moments after I said that the words "the high is never even comprehendible to the low " came tumbling out of my mouth...
Chemical imbalances in my brain are the ones to come hurdling down at me like raindrops of thunderstorms in Kansas because I can't seem to ever catch a "good umbrella". Happiness dwindles just as fast as it came and the low is something that the doctors can't prescribe medication for. The doctors can toy with your emotions and not in the way THAT person can, but in a way that they prescribe medications to do it for them.
Happiness is the worst emotion because if your brain is as completely unbalanced as mine, (as you can see from the work previous to this) then you know the pain and aching loneliness of the low.

It's called anxiety.
Sometimes, I can pay attention to you.
Sometimes, I can't.
Some days are better than other ones.
But the others,
Well, the other ones look a little like trains Going a little too fast for their tracks
Like clocks that break their glass fronts
And cartoon characters with smoke
Coming from their heels when they run
Running faster than the 60 seconds a minute allows
It is my body moving too fast for me to Catch my breath but I'm just sitting at my Desk tapping my pencil and I can feel the Teacher drilling holes into the back of my
Skull
I know the God-awful sound is killing her
But it is keeping me from going insane
It is chewing away the insides of my Cheeks
And scratching at my forehead
Looking for answers
But always coming up with hungry hands
It's hearing white noise
And glass shattering
And candles flickering
I know I should not be hearing a candle
Dance
But I do
It's just me spinning out of control
I know you've noticed I'm no longer using Punctuation but this is how I always feel
This is how my mind is
It is always racing
My foot swings back and forth like
Poe's Pit and the Pendulum swinging faster and faster towards my chest and it's Always on fire
My hands fumble with puzzle pieces
Because I identify with the one that's
Always missing
It is being lonely in the hands of someone
Who loves me
I feel his calloused hands hollowly like I
Don't have a right to them
It is wanting to scream to the hooded
Figure in the door "I'm scared" but it
Coming out as an inaudible crack in my
Voice
I find solace in the cracks between tile
I'm looking at my reflection in black Screens wishing I could just pick myself Up
From the bottom of orange bottles with
Safety-***** lids
A doctor once told me one day I would be
Okay
But one day seems to be miles and
Years away
I've shrunk to the size of a stick
My bones jutting out every which way
Paper-thin and too many words to fill the
Hole in my confidence a man once bore Into me
My hands shake when I step into a church
Like I've done something wrong
My mind goes over every event up until
Now wondering why my hands shake and
My chest drops below the floor
Grandmother tells me I will go to hell if I Do not act right and my mother tells me it Is
All in my head
But again a doctor gave me
An orange bottle with thirty tiny white pills And told me one day everything Would be
Okay.
I just want it to be okay.
My mind is always racing like the way "Normal"
Ones do before taking a test not studied for.
I'm sure you will consider this an episode
Of marked depression, but this monster is Anxiety.
Sometimes I can pay attention to you.
Other times I can't because of this
Infinitely.
Running.
Mind.