People who fight
their battles alone
either lose the battle
or lose themselves.

There are 10 kinds of people in this world,
and binary accounts for them all.

They're happy and sad.
They're ones and zeros.
Villains and heroes.
Villains, yet not all bad.
Despite everything life decides to hurl;
Despite every brick ball of fear
Through the stained glass windows of their minds,
Through it all, they survive.
They're angry and glad.
They're happy and sad.

And in their duality, they're still smiling there
at your sharp hasty words
at your venomous hurt
that you wish so desperately they, too, shared.

the world only commits to one word
when no explination can show
the answer or
when not even bandaids
can clean up a mess
when the only things we have left may not hold off for long
the dust suffocating our throats and blinding our eyes
trying to reassure safety
to stop the fists from raising
and the children from crying for their parents
our minds being sliced away from
intelligence
from lies
with the knives of each other
maybe
maybe it is all just a dream that we won't wake up from
but maybe
this is reality
maybe they'll agree if i try
try
try
maybe
it wasn't meant to be
the word fills our mouths with the bitterness of what might happen if we say yes or no
maybe if we don't decide
it will all go away
maybe the answer isn't meant to be known
maybe they'll understand
maybe
maybe we'll understand that not answering isn't the answer to a problem
might
may
the only ones who use them are the ones who can't decide themselves
confused
wondering
waiting
for someone else
because
maybe they'll know how to fix this

maybe.

if you are missing him, remember this. remember how cruel he was to you, how every time he drove away the moonlight made your skin look bruised, it made you feel soft. remember that you are not. you might break but you will always heal. think of the nights where he turned away and refused to let you touch him, nights where he moaned your best friends' names into your mouth while you tried to prove how much you loved him, nights where he'd refuse to stop yelling until you put your hands on him. do not think of his hands, or his mouth, or any of the bones in his body. they're not for you. they're not for anybody but himself and you should pity the fact he doesn't know how to love them. you gave your best to him and he crumpled it up until it looked like your worst. don't feel sorry for being emotional, he was a gaping wound in your chest and things like that deserve a good cry. if you're missing him, remember how distant he was, how when you'd sink down on him he wouldn't be looking at your face. how his shoes were always graffitied with the numbers of other girls. how in the middle of a date he asked another girl her name. I know it hurts, it's going to be okay, I promise. remember how unhelpful he was? how little he cared, moving so fast he could never type the 'I?' he blamed you for loving him too much, for being too sad: both things were his fault. I know it doesn't seem like it but I promise there is somebody much, much more lovely, somebody who will treat you like a cloud, and won't throw a fit when you start to rain. you just have to wait.

people tell me i’m
lucky because at least i lost
him knowing that he
loved me, at least it wasn’t as painful as a
breakup. if this isn’t
pain then please tell me words for this swallowing
wound in the middle of my
chest, explain how i can’t find my own
hands even in broad
daylight and every time i think i
see him around our
house i know to take it as a
sign that i need to call my shrink back up, tell her
about the ghost at the core of my
life.

i can still feel his
hands in mine, long pianist man
fingers and encompassing
palms, wide open like a
map soaked in
blood.

he was so long
gone by the time that they
found him, his own fragile
mother couldn’t identify the
body, i was the only
one who knew how my hands were supposed to fit his
hips, the only good part of him
left.

my doctor tells me that i’ve passed the threshold for
grief, this isn’t healthy, she
tells me. how am i expected to know the meaning of that
word when the only thing i can
explain is the incessant ringing in my
ear, the sound of the
bullet that went farther than i ever
dared.

we were supposed to get
married, he just didn’t have the
money, but he gave me everything else off his very own
back. at night i stay up repeating the names of the
children we were going to
have, all three of
them. now they seem like more of an
insult to the holy
trinity.

god, how did you feel when satan
fell? i demand you on your
knees, begging me to
believe in you again. do you know how it feels to be in love with a
ghost?

once a boy called me for three hours just to talk about my favourite
movie. i never said i
loved him. like everything
else, winter murdered whatever we
had and the next
summer was very
foreign. once a boy loved
me and never told
me. the last night he walked away from my
porch i pictured him as a cloud of
tears, as a white
flag. once i loved a
boy and when i told him, he said ‘i
know.’ my best friend tells me i’m good at making
fists. i try to find
god in vintage wallpaper and downtown
bars, sitting so
long that my ears flood with the signal
notes of a lonely man’s
saxophone. here, you can smell cemeteries and
playgrounds on the same
street. here,
boys never love you
back. once, i broke a rock in my bare
hand. once, a boy i hardly ever
talked to told me that i was a good
poet in the way i explained
things and asked me please not to become a
dead one. i didn’t know what i
meant when i told him i’d
try. once i loved a boy so full of
anger that his god begged him for
mercy. i think i almost
loved a boy once.

you remember his lips on
yours, how they felt like tar and you knew he was something
you did not want to stick to. the aftermath was like climbing out of a
net while covered in honey, he told you, smiling, how sweet you
were but you’re clenching your fists waiting for the
bees. sting me here and here and here and
here, cut off my hands so i never have to know what
losing your child before it’s fourth
birthday feels like.

when you were little, your
mother used to read you bedtime
stories about princes and dragons and lots of happy ever
afters. but where is the ‘after’ when your best friend
hates you? where is the
‘before?’

your therapist is reading you an
eliot poem in hopes it’ll calm you
down, in hopes you’ll replace memories of that
boy with bob
dylan and that couch with thoughts of empty
fields. every time it comes into your
head, bob won’t write songs about
you and the field screams ‘i am not
empty, i am
open.’

call you Vada, accuse you of being in
love with your teacher and killing your
mother; the first thing you ever ruined on
accident. you wish you were thomas
j, you wish you were genetically pre
dispositioned to crumble like a heart made of
sand when a bee sticks himself
into you.

your best friend won’t be your
best friend anymore and you’re ripping pages out of the
calendar and swallowing january
whole, there’s more ways to die than to stay
alive. suicides are their own
language, the suicidal are like
carpenters, they always ask ‘what
tools’ instead of
‘why build’.

you’re begging to the god your best
friend believes in to let you die
young. every minute of the
afterward feels like one more
tally on his list of worst
betrayals. satan is
smiling because you’re playing the game he
invented.

but what if the devil
doesn’t know he’s the devil?

it started out with a crash and a
blast and it ended in a mouthful of
bees.

misophonia is not getting angry when you hear people breathing or eating. misophonia is 'i'm supposed to feel
stronger because there's a scientific
reason behind all the pain clenched like a fist inside my own body, I'm
supposed to feel better.' that's what doctors say. but the answer is a long list of riddles the doctors can't
decode. 'we know why your heart is
breaking, but we don't know how to
stop it.' misophonia is the maximum number of pills I can hold without dropping any. it's the moment when my doctor says she won't allow me to go to a college more than two hours away. it's the effort to smash my own bones on cement just to drown out the sound of somebody talking about what they had for dinner. it's that autocorrect and spellcheck still don't  recognize it as a word. it's about hearing sounds so menacing and monumental that not a night goes by where they don't swallow me whole. it's the fear of leaving my house and hearing something bad. it's my hands not feeling like hands and everything I try to touch turning into snow. it's having to bring headphones everywhere in case I hear a word I hate. it's my doctor telling me with a sad look on her face that she'd be surprised if I make it to 45 years old. it's having to ask directors if any of my trigger words are in the script before I see a show. it's the knowledge that I'm a quickly ticking time bomb, that it gets worse over time. that I might wake up tomorrow morning not being able to stand the sound of my mother's voice. it's the fact that the most common result of misophonia is self harm but I've made it this far without it. it's my chest igniting every time I hear someone start to talk. (I'm sorry I can't marry you, I can't stand the sound of your voice in the morning). it's simple words that can cause my composure to break like a separation of continents, like all that hurt never meant anything. years of wishing, on my knees, that I was deaf so I could skip the chapters when my whole body feels like a slowly melting candle, like I'm not allowed to be afraid of fire. it's in 9th grade when the bell rang to go home and I was sitting in the back row of English class with my fingers pressed so far into my ears they popped, trembling, until Mrs Gitsis asked someone to take me to the counseling centre. it's not 'ew, I hate the sound of people chewing.' do you lose sleep because the reverberations of that sound won't leave your head? do you have to lock the windows on your second floor to feel safe? it's having to wear gloves in 90 degree weather because I can't see my hands without them. it's waking up at 3am to arms that turn into stumps, unable to go get help because the sound of footsteps makes me want to die. it's reaching for a knife every time somebody says a common word. misophonia is being taken out of school because I can't sit with other kids in the cafeteria. it's hearing clapping after a show that's supposed to be for me transforming into screeching metal tires reverberating around my skull at frequencies i didn't know were possible. it's feeling every nerve ending in my body start to tingle seconds before someone says a trigger word, like god feels bad for all he's done so far and he's trying to send me a sign. it's the fact that most therapists haven't even heard of it. it's the fact that the ones who have don't know a cure. it's that there is no cure. it's when all someone has to do is repeat sentences, words, and phrases they know will break me. it's when my second therapist told me I was making it up. it's when my parents told me I just wanted to boss people around. it's when I started not being able to eat dinner with my family anymore. it's growing up in a household with a parent affected by serious OCD who has to vacuum 24/7 but I can't hear a vacuum or else I'll try to see my pulse from the inside. it's the sadness and anger that clenches itself around my heart like a fist until I feel like the dust I was created from. it's when something as simple as the sound of a drawer closing makes me wish I were dead. it's the knowledge that one day I won't be able to handle feeling like an abandoned building and the volcano inside of my head will erupt. it's the knowledge that I can't get help. I can't ever get help.