1.** When you would see him,
You would think he was the most beautiful creature
But when he kissed the palm of your hands,
They left a trail of fire that burned
A hole the size of the Milky Way

You convinced yourself each night
After the last person,
You wouldn’t fall back in
For writing creates the same pain
As loving someone does

2. You kept me tucked between your lips
Like a tab in a worn book that
You can flip back to when you are bored and lonely

3. You taught me how to keep
My words in my head
Stuck to my tongue
Like sandpaper rubbing back and forth on metal
To pick my words carefully
To filter my thoughts out

4. You were the equivalent to
An ugly red infection that
Needed to be surgically removed
But instead was picked out with a fork

5. He does not love you
He is not your Prince Charming
He will not come for you in the pouring rain
Stop waiting.

6. He sees you as a child
With more growing to do
You were a ****** up enormity
That needed to find its place

Years beyond your age
But sometimes you would question
Who the older one truly was

7. Two beings on different trails
One was a star
And the other was a tree
Deeply rooted to its morals
And the other flying around freely

He bought you things
Without being asked
Visited you
And even kissed you
He thought you were beautiful
But he stopped
And he left
And he will not return

8. He does not worry for you
He did not think twice when
You told him you wanted to **** yourself
He did not say anything
But stare
When he saw your scarred arms
With all the past experiences
Each one whispering
A new story
A new person
And a new future

9. His eyes
Were full of life
While yours
Were dull and
He knew then,
What monstrosity you were inside

When he said
“An outlet for what is upstairs”
You translated it as
“An outlet to get away from me”
“An outlet to leave me alone”
“An outlet to
Cover up the past
And patch up the future”

10. He burned you
Out of his life
Like a cigarette ****
Against a wooden table
Or a glass tray
That he found lost in his attic
And you did too
It took time,
And lots of nights spent crying
But you did,
And you are free.

Growing up, you wanted to be a princess. But you wanted to be your own hero. Insisting all you needed was a bit of love

They say, "No, a princess cannot wear a crown and suit"

Handed dolls, cars taken away

They say, "Oh, that's so gay!"

They say, "Hey, ******"

They say, "What a ***"

They say to grow up. Be a lady. Get some manners; grow a pair

But then you do, and they stare. Bonded with tape; compressed, hidden away from sight

Zachary,
Tucked away in your pocket. Except that pocket is your skin, your bones

They say

If you are one of us, then do this. But you cannot. There is not enough testosterone; not enough muscle

So they laugh. Say you are weak, and a liar

They say

This is a phase. You will regret it. It is simply not possible

Zachary does not exist. He is not real. You are just young

You do not know

You are a female. Despite your protests, they insist anyway

They say, "Have you seen it? Is it a boy or a girl? Is it gay or straight? It's an it. An it. It's a monster."

They say, "I bet I can make you straight" with their glint in their eyes, that have already lowered you, to that of dirt. And then, when you get hurt, it's your fault. For tempting them, for being yourself, not
theirs

They say
You are nothing

They say
You will get hurt. And they are right They do not lie, but they are dishonest

Whispers pass you. Pointing from children, and mothers shielding their eyes
"Don't look at that, it'll make you sick"

Adults of authority, giggling and taunting
Hushing each other, to no avail
Putting you in classes where you don't belong
Making you cry, when they do not listen
The urge to scream, "I am human, too. I deserve comfort"
Anxious to speak up, fear of being dismissed

People misgender you
Call you a girl, if you are a boy
And vise versa
Call you sir or ma'am, when you are neither, or both
You are afraid to speak up. Say, "No, that is not me"

Parents who don't understand. They all begin that way
Not believing, and blaming themselves
Educate them

Zachary is here, standing on his toes
Wishing,
To be seen
To be acknowledged
No longer a scab you feel the urge to pick;
No longer skin you feel the urge to tear
Zachary is here
He has always been here
He is not an it

The bells are tingling, crescendoing impatiently, creating a ruckus of taps within your chemically imbalanced head

Your hands shake with all the untold words, bottled up within your throat and unable to explode like a volcano of molten rock until people stand in shock and admire not the destruction but the beauty

You enclose yourself into a small corner as soon as their is an unknown force that you cannot adequately deal with and hope they leave soon so you can lower your defenses just a bit; for you are afraid of leaving the house and being stared down until you run away like a kicked dog with his tail tucked between his legs

You apologize for things you didn't do, not out of guilt but because you feel obligated to

For you see, when you have social anxiety it is hard to communicate with anyone, even yourself. You live in fear of saying the wrong thing, of messing something up, of splitting apart like an egg cracked in the middle and all the yolk spilling out beyond your hands reaches

When you were a child, you would ask the closest person to hold your hands and count to ten, and that closest person was usually yourself

Your heart flutters like a butterflies  wings flapping wildly in a storm

Your breathing shudders as you try urgently to not shed tears not from sadness but from fear

Some describe social anxiety as naught but a tiny fear when in reality it is more like treading open water in the middle of nowhere with no help in sight, and the waves threaten to push you down until you are far out of reach

Some imagine people with anxiety as being introverts, when in reality it also happens to extroverts. It happens to all races, genders, and sexualities

When you live with anxiety, it is all you can think about. You strategize how to survive each obstacle of the day

One thing you can tell them to do if you cross paths and you notice their shallow breathing and their shaking and sweaty palms is to just

Breathe.

You are under my skin
Crawling through my veins,
Enclosing yourself in my ribs
Digging out to the surface
You are the wind in the trees,
The dying leaves as they fall down
The breaking of hearts
Under cold December nights
You are the shrieking
On long insomnia nights
You are the thought that keeps me awake
Lying under the pale moon sky
And counting the stars
That will create a nebula
You are the ache in my bones
Breaking from the pressure
Of staying alive
You are the dust in my body
Coiled around my heart
Squeezing the air from my lungs
Trapping yourself in the corners of my mind
Burning yourself into my memory
You are in everything
And nowhere at all
You are everything
And nothing at all

We have all loved skeletons at one point- maybe as lovers, a person with benefits, or a friend. Skeletons that looked just like us; zombies walking the same path, no longer caring for their way. Pieces of a soul that were so shattered no amount of band aids and peroxide could heal it

Your expressions that entranced not just I, but many past lovers. Ones that are not intended for me, but if I try hard enough, I imagine they are so

Your hands were delicately carved work, and your bones, your bones, the finely formed structure of intricate words, whispered in the dead of night to the crook of your neck

You overtook my thoughts; shadowed me in my sleep, molding my dreams to nightmares. All I can think is “would they like this?” or “that?”. You are a dictator with an iron fist on my heart of weathered steel. You are the reason I write; why I wrote until the crack of dawn when no other soul was awake except for the lonely and the in love

My nightmares and reality merge into one, until I do not know which is which, but I do know that wherever you are, I am searching for you in the deepest corners of my mind to find lost memories, waiting to create new ones

And I know that, despite our differences, you are buried deep into my skin, a fragrance that I cannot wash away with tomato juice no matter how much I match the sticky substance

The one beautiful thing I have not gotten bored of; the one person I have not walked away from. When you have an obsessive personality, which quickly turns to boredom, it is hard to find that one person who keeps you from that

You are the one beautiful thing I never regretted latching on to

But the minute I saw you, I knew I would not do the same, no matter how much I would want to. The second I saw you, I knew I wanted to be the one who was the first to see your face each morning, and the last at night. I knew I wanted to be the one to kiss your wrinkles between your brows away, to wipe your salted tears off your cheeks and wash them from your pillows; I knew that if I were to meet your family, I would say “Thank you for him. Thank you for this great person who not only brings light to my world, but is a sun to many others.”

I knew that despite all that, you would never be mine. For you see, you are a star, a planet bigger then the solar system that contains your tiny toy of a body, and I was simply orbiting you, pulling farther away with each passing day

You wield a weapon, dangling from your fingertips that no one sees, but you can feel inwardly, pushing deeper and deeper until it is so embedded I no longer feel it. You morph me between your nails like the water cuts through rocks and forms them into sand, leaving nothing but the past remains of centuries of wear and tear and pushing and pulling and-

You control every turn I take- “Do not walk out in front of that car” and “Do not push yourself so far down you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel”

You are the reason I wake up each day, and vow to myself to survive, for if I survive today, one day I will live

I count the days until I will tell you; fearing each day that you will find someone who could love you better then I, a person who is not a whirlwind of emotions and hair and everything negative in the world but is beautiful and a doll and will become the grass on your core, melting the molten rock and oozing out on late nights when no one is home and not a soul is awake

And I cannot sleep knowing there will be someone who will love you better than I; cannot breath knowing there will be the doomsday of my heart, when it falls to pieces and is crushed like marrow with the same nails that molded me to be something I was not; cannot stay in one place as long as I know I have one in a million chance of winning you, a piece in the lottery that is greater then the reward; cannot scream for my lungs have given out, my throat has dried out and there are no more tears left to spill for a man who does not look at me twice

You are the first beautiful thing I have latched on to, and you will not be the last I will let go of

There are some things
I never said
And some
I have not forgotten about you
They are as follows

1. I have not forgotten
The way your lips parted
When you would say my name
As if it were some prayer
And not some messily scrawled pencil work
In the back of a stall

2. I have not forgotten
The way you would hold me
When I told you I wanted to die
When you would sit with me
And see that I was a monster
That there was a beast
Hiding inside of my head
And no amount of love
Could rid it

3. You were like Beast
And I was like Beauty
Maybe it was the other way around
Maybe you were the one
Who brought lights to others
And I was the one who drowned

4. Not everything about you was bad
You taught me
What love feels like
What true love can do
How,
Despite everything a person feels
Love can make you or break you
And you broke me

5. I told myself
I would not have another relationship
And I lied to myself
I do not know how
To be serious anymore
All I can do is
Play around
And cheat myself

6. I couldn't think of anything else
But the way your hands curved
The way your knuckles shouted
My name when they were curled
Around my neck

The way your mouth
Formed my name
On my neck
And created a bruise
That lasted for centuries

The way you pressed
Yourself against me
And whispered
"I love you, so much"

7. Do you still love me now?

8. I never told you
That I started smoking
So I could burn your scent
Out of my lungs
And taste you in my mouth

I never told you
That I started drinking
So I could forget you
And forget myself

I never told you
I started acting out
So you could pay attention to me again

I never told you
Just how much
You ****** me up

9. You were the name I moaned out
On restless Saturday nights

You are no longer that name

10. You taught me
How to fall in love with strangers
So much that
I saw their tiny little flaws
And still thought they were beautiful

I could see
The flowers growing from
Their broken and withered body
And I thought to myself
Thank you,
For teaching me how to love
But also ******* me over

Once, I asked my mother what it felt like to be in love

She told me:
"I still question now
How to get every sticky word
Out of my whirlwind mind

When I can't focus on one thing at a time
And wonder how to tear myself apart
Just to let you know everything"

She gave me a list
And told me to write down
What I was thinking

1. He calmed you
When you became a storm
Shut down the thoughts you had
But over time
He went from being the center
To being the hurricane

2. You were always afraid
Of religious people
Afraid they would shoot you down
But when you found out about him
You could no longer think nor move

3. You knew if you tried
You could be smart
But with so much illness,
That was near impossible
But he refused to let you think that
Until you started to feel insignificant
Compared to him
You felt nothing

4. You would carve his image
Etched into your nightmares
Like a marble stone made of glass shards
Perfected by the hands of Donatello
Getting down to every little detail
Graffitied yourself into my skin
With the letters:
"This is my muse"
And picked your way into
Everything I was and am

You squirmed your way under
And started to spread like a disease
Latching on
With the strength of silk cocoons

5. I learned what it meant
To hate someone so much
Because they became your poison
The liquor you drank one too many times
A drunk I can only get away from
By throwing my self respect away
And inhaling a fume of forgiveness

When I let my mother know this,
She just looked at me in pity
And told me that was how it started
With my father

She pushed me away
And told me to keep writing

6. When I told you
I wanted to die
I didn't mean it figuratively
But you looked at me
As if I had made a joke
And every scar
Screamed your name

7. A self taught lover
Who whispered her poems
To men who didn't listen
And to women too high to care

The definition of love
Became the equivalent
To the adjective of pain

8. Instead of focusing on how
They would scrunch their eyes when they laughed
Or the way they wrapped their fingers together
As if going into prayer
Or how a sunset reminded you of
The way their eyes looked
When they were open and honest
And not feeding others ******* from a spoon

You focused on the more shallow things
How they never seemed to say sorry without laughing
Or how he made you feel like a skeleton
A background image
Painted onto a beginners portrait
That was lit up into flames and
Had gasoline poured over the edges

9. You learned all the different routes
You could take to catch a glimpse
Perfected your timings
Down to a millisecond
Memorizing the way for an easy escape
And taught to hold your breathe
While you were buried under tides

I knew I had to get away,
But the thing was,
I didn't know how

10. If I were to ever fall into the trap
Of baby-making, I knew
That I would have two boys
One named after you
And one after the man who taught me what love was
And what it meant to lose it for the first time

When I told my mother how I felt,
She just looked at me with tears in her eyes,
And warned me of what I was up against

She told me
"Darling, you will face mountains and volcanoes
You will push stars and moons
You will learn to clip your wings before you learn how to talk
And you will learn what it means
To be a spider caught in another's web
And you'll hurt, but you'll enjoy it, because it makes you feel alive"