I feel like I’m on fire.
Limbs shaking, fingers slick with guilt and anticipation.
I can’t continue to put myself through this, but I also understand that I can’t just leave you behind to your own devices.
It’s been seven years since I became your savior.
Seven years since I became your crutch.
Thirteen years old, losing hold on my innocence as you held on to me like I was your life source.
The only solid thing holding you down to the ground.

In some ways, I was happy to help you.
Days turned in to years, I felt my first taste of heart break, my first real taste of fear.
The strange exhilarating rush of childish intimacy wrapped in the hands of a meddling boy, and you stuck beside me, as mothers should.
I thank you for that.

I’ve been ****** dry.
Seven years of listening to you pull yourself apart.
Seven years of me growing deeper into being a self sufficient woman; sharing my secrets and my advice in hopes of pulling you closer.
In hopes of pulling you back to the surface.

Three years ago, you picked up the bottle.
Three years ago, you gave up on being a mother because you said that you didn’t know how to be.
Three years ago, you gave me the ohkay go to become an independent person.
Three years ago, you strapped chains to my core and began living vicariously through me and my stories, and I obliged.

I tried to save you.
I begged you to stop drinking.
I pleaded to you.
Please come back. Please be my mother again. Please help me, because I’m lost, and I don’t know how to come back.
But you didn’t know how to come back either, and I held on to your hands as you cried and told me that you were just as lost.

Wake up
There are no birds to be heard
There’s a stillness held captive, lining all four walls
Eyes open, but are still glazed over
Uncertainty settles in
Arms wrapped tightly around a shaking core
Mind spinning
The bitter taste of distrust creeping to the back of an empty throat
There is no common ground
A battle field of paranoia and nervousness
Tugging and unraveling the tightly sewn threads of a composed demeanor

My girl doesn’t have perfect legs; they are scarred from blindly leaping into rivers and climbing up trees. Bare feet. Cut hands. The Earth receives her well but the rocks and stones push back against the soft flesh of her calves.

My girl has traces of pain hidden on herself where she tried to let it out, arms crossed over an aching chest, she’s a master of hide and seek.

My girl is at constant battle with herself, asleep on the couch, I can hear her stomach growling. She’s on a diet of fruits and honey, she doesn’t see herself melting away.

My girl has dreams where she smiles in her sleep, where she bites her lip and smirks at four o’clock in the morning, when sleep finally overtakes her small form. Underneath the covers; hiding away from a world that she no longer wishes to be a part of.

My girl never cries, even when I can tell that she’s breaking on the inside. Quietly, she’ll sit. Quietly, she’ll write in her journals, small delicate sweeps of the pen across blank unlined paper. She looks like a small author, or a whisperer of dark secrets, crouched over her journal.

My girl is a mystery wrapped up in a beautifully torn and bruised shell. She leaves sickly sweet reminders of herself wherever she goes. Her bare feet prints show; mud and dirt and love on my heart.

There is an unsettling pain
that has taken root deep within the fibers of my being.
A nervous ache that comes and goes
just as you do.

The fear of taking my next step forward has rendered me defenseless to my own devices and I find myself unable to sleep in fear
that some self created form of you will visit me as I try to unconsciously push you out.

Sometimes I feel as though there is no end to this constant whirlwind of barbed wire feelings that encapsulate themselves inside of my heart and mind.

I still long for the smooth touch of the fingers that showed me what it meant to feel whole again.
I do not want this to become a vice.
An impasse between heart and mind
Wherein I leave behind the very essence of myself that made it possible to survive in a world where I can’t feel you.

The passage of time only signifies and solidifies the fact that I should break these urgent fingers while I can still run and hide

I can still taste your name when I listen to our favorite songs.
Except instead of basil and summer time sweat
It tastes like bile and blood from biting my ******* sorry attempt to keep my insides, inside.

I don’t know how this sweeping ache returned.
Maybe it’s because everything around me is some part of you.
We grew gardens out of one another and I’m still watering the flowers that are growing from my fingertips and every other part of me where your lips planted seeds.

My body is now overgrown with memories that seem like weeds
My arms are heavy from trying to hold everything up.


I used to think that maybe if I could expel my insides, I could get rid of this burning sensation that has taken up home inside of myself.
Like a frog who’s eaten a wasp, I’d cleanse myself and push the bad out.
Then again, I don’t know if I want you out.

I guess it’s comforting to know that something inside of myself has grown so out of control, that not even I can get a grip on it.