Someone from the school I haven’t been to in six months asked me how I’d been, where’d I’d been.

And as my head and heart played tango, as a boxing match took place In my stomach, I eventually managed to stutter out a response,

“I’ve been OK”

When all I really wanted to say, to explain was boiling, bubbling, crumbling, something. The thing I use to stitch myself up at night when the world is too much and my brain really feels like ******* me over. On the nights where the thin red lines aren’t enough to quitien the white noise and the demon cries that haunt my head.

You see all I really wanted to say was,

My brain is an echoing hallway drenched in lonely.

It never learned how to be ok.

And I don’t know how to ask.

I miss the anxiety, the warm comfort of it. The predictability in the unpredictable of it. It would show I was just never quite sure when. Anxiety showed up when no one else did. And I miss the faint thunder of my heart how it used to threaten to burst from my chest. I miss the pool of sweat that would collect on my palms painting everything I touched. 

I don’t know how to be ok.

I miss the mania. How it would destroy me from the inside out. Shredding and burning my nerves until I felt like I could finally feel something. Until I felt on fire. I miss becoming Icarus and flying so, so close to the sun. I miss the stars blanketed in an inky french sky as I swam in the pool at three in the morning.

I  just wanted to see the stars before I fell asleep.

I miss the nativity in believing I could starve the lonely right out of me.

I miss the self-loathing. The familiar warm heat of hatred that would settle on my lower belly until I couldn’t breathe. Until I was gasping for air. I miss the feeling of being so utterly consumed by something. Of being devoured by something until I had nothing left to give. 

I miss having nothing left to give.

I miss the dissociation. The blissed out numbness where the whole world was wrapped in cling film. I miss the fog and the low hanging clouds that obscured my vision and blunted my senses. I miss being an extra in my own movie.

I miss haunting myself.

My brain is a clanging corridor haunted by the childhood I did not have and my memories which aren’t my memories.

Memories that buzz around the foot of my bed. Twisting and turning, transporting and transforming into dreams.

My brain is a ripped page from the end of a book.  Tattered and torn, scribbled and scattered. The reader so desperate so disillusioned by reality that they dreamt up a happy ending filled with ghosts and ghouls and half rembeared, smoke-screen people. Of warped laughter and gargled screams.

My brain is a concave of nothing but the smell of sun cream and cigarette smoke.

My brain is taking a bath with its ears underwater. Completely submerged in lukewarm, swirling, sloshing liquid.

And my brain doesn’t know how to be ok.

It’s never learnt how to be anything but a swirling cesspool of anger and doubt and a few flies that got caught along the way.

I miss haunting myself.

This whole not killing myself buisness is ******* exhausting but I’ve been told it gets better. 

Easier. 

Eventually. 

I can’t imagine it ever being easy.

And some days I still miss haunting myself.

But I’m giving being alive a shot, properly alive not just swimming around in a fish bowl, alive. I just need to remember to read the instructions, this time round and save the thirty day warranty.

You never know, it could be handy.

But when you ask me, in the carpark on 36th street, wearing converse, blue skinny jeans and your beats.

The words get stuck in my throat.

So yeah, that’s what I really wanted to say, but I don’t.
                                                                                                                                                
“I’m OK.”

“You?”

And in the prohibition the US government poisoned 10,000 of it's own citizens. Slipping cyanide into beer bottles and arsenic into wine caskets lying on bedside tables. And people still kept going back, despite swollen tongues and heaving lungs. 10,000 people lying in unmarked graves, and people kept drinking their lives away.

And I keep going back, drinking from the same poisoned chalice in the hopes it will **** me quicker. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And I don't know if I've ever been so picture perfect, so dictionary definition.

I go back over and over again.

They say you can get addicted to a certain kind of pain.

Pain that licks up your spine and dances in your lower belly.

Pain that forms a crown of thorns, a daisy chain, scrunching your stomach until you can't breathe.

Oh how can something so beautiful, so lying on the grass outside of school under blue skies and wispy clouds, be so painful?

You ******, you ruined daisy chains for me.

And yet I keep going back.

They say, you can get addicted to a certain kind of pain.

Pain, that is screamed, pain that is hollered, pain that is whispered.

Pain, that makes you want to put your entire hand through the window pane, glass be dammed.

And people say pick your poison, and I wonder if it came from the 10,000 who kept going back.

I wonder if they know that I picked mine a long time ago.

You see,

When your world, is black and white, because someone forgot to turn on the light. When all you feel is numb and exhaustion, pain is nice. Pain is a comfort, a red warm blanket that you huddle beneath as you pretend that the storm raging out side is not somehow your fault. But why wouldn't it be, after all everything is your fault.

Pain reminds you that you can feel.

So yeah, you keep going back.

If the only way to remind yourself that you are not a robot, a well-oiled machine is to go back to mustard yellow walls and the pungent smell of sorrow.

Than let's just say you have a knack for picking out the sharpest knife to fall on.

They say you can get addicted to a certain kind of pain.

You say to me never to inhale **** or ecstasy or LSD, you tell me they are poisons people wilfully put in there bodies between gulps of the bottle clenched tight in your fist.

I wonder if you know that sometimes I imagine my neck, between stubby fingers and bursting veins.

I wonder if you know that I picked my poison a long time ago.

You speak yourself into a storm. Painting the rain drops, with the words tip-tapping, slipping from your throat. You blow on embers, golden red, in the hopes of creating a forest fire, in the hopes of being the forest fire. You cannot imagine yourself a hurricane, daydream into a tsunami, and yet you do, you do.

Girl, you are no hurricane, you are someone who is so afraid of stopping, that instead of standing still you fashion, imagine, try to imagine that the fire licking up your spine, is not somehow your fault.

Girl, you are no apocalypse, you are no natural disaster, you are just a garden where things have forgotten how to grow.

Yet you do, imagine yourself a hurricane, pray that you will drown under the words, spilling from your throat.

Girl,

Slow down

Just a minute

Hold on.

Girl,

You cannot fashion yourself a natural disaster, make yourself a cosmic galaxy and than you cannot wonder why it still hurts when you bleed.

Girl,

Hold on,

Please.

You can go to therapy.

I know

Radical

Right?

You can get up and shower or if that’s to hard brush your teeth.

You can stop praying that by hating everyone around you they will to.

You can stop hoping that by not existing out of four, thin walls that you will cease to be someone, something. After all, no-one mourns the living dead.

Girl,

I beg you, stop, just for a second.

Because you are no hurricane.

No world ending, life threatening disaster.

Girl,

You are human, and you feel and you love and you cry.

And girl,

For gods sake, go to therapy.