I'm a bullet with your name on it.
I lick my lips green,
And the whole world melts around us.
You used to swim in the sea as a kid,
Or atleast I dream you did,
You still have the salt in your hair
And running in your eyes
And I don't know  which part of me I want you to break first.
You see
When I was small
I thought the more pieces of me I had
The sharper I would be.
But they broke me down and cut their hands
Until I had to file myself down to stop all the carnage.
I never wanted to be a bad thing,
But you made pain sound so sweet
Coming from your sucker punch lips.
You cradle my throat like a bird wing
And i am so afraid to fly.

You hold my throat like feathers
Waiting for the struggle
But I am too afraid to fly.

You told me you were falling for me
Like it was a lecture
Like I should be taking notes
Write it down and look it over
Some other day
When I might actually care

You told me you were falling for me
About the life you pictured for us
All I could picture was you hitting the ground

I don't ******* food when I eat.

Love isn't supposed to make you want to go back to therapy.

I felt good about myself when you held my hand.

My comfort zone was so big with you, I was able to step out of it.

You think I'm stupid for not knowing how to love you.

You think I'm broken because I can't love you.

My bones are so heavy they can't get away,

My heart is so empty it wants to scream.

I don't think this is what love is,

just because you do.

I havent found you in another body.
My hands wither
with every new touch,
But nothing new
ever blooms in the summer.
Me and you were a crash landing
And every parachute has a whole in it.

I was supposed to get over you.
10 years is far too long
To spend aching yourself awake.
The last time I cried on someone's shoulder
I called them your name.
I haven't made eye contact with someone
and meant it
since you last held my hand.

His jaw against my thumb felt more hollow than your lungs,
and I don't know how to breakup
with someone without a heartbeat.

I tie my strings together,
Before the frays can scare you away.
You like me when I'm begging,
But only half hearted.

I started being vulnerable the day I realized endearment was no longer an anchor,
But you wear masculinity like a chain, too heavy for me to ever hold you.
It's maddening
Watching you run from me,
Sidestep and tiptoe across emotions.
The world used to be my racetrack,
Til I drove into the wall and still came out lonely on the otherside.
I never hit the breaks for you.

You want me *******,
But I've never been good
at unraveling slow.

I am always missing out.
They locked me inside of my own house
And keep bragging about what the leaves look like on the trees.
There is so much happening
And I have far too many keys to sort
Before I can unlock the door.
I cut all the papers with your name on them into a pile and jumped in,
Fell into a dream where the sun is orange but burns so hot it looks white.

I'm a firm believer in music but haven't listened to it in years.
When the birds sing
It sounds like pebbles against the windows.

I put you in the ground the day I told someone your name.
Let it drip from my lips like a flood,
Like a dam bursting,
Filled to the brim with grief.
They say I talk about you like your waiting for me on the porch,
Like it's just a door that's keeping us apart.

They'll never understand how it can still feel like that.
How speaking your name was the closest I'll come to a eulogy,
How my heart still races when someone knocks.

They think I'm crazy
Because I keep yelling about the bars on the windows,
How you keep throwing pebbles
to me.
My mother opens the blinds
But the sun won't shine through,
Throws open the glass
But the wind jams in the screen.
My soul still feels like a room you can't air out,
Mourning is a dark room you can't light up.

You loop the rope around my wrists,
so delicately
I almost forget this is supposed to thrill me.
Your eyes glow barbaric
but mine can't unlock
from the braided cord
just barely rubbing my skin.

I never liked ropes in these kinds of situations,
I never felt they were right kind of tempting.
You see when you become part of the other you have to embrace it,
Like a flaw,
Only this one comes with a body count.
The rough texture of the rope feels like hay,
Like beard stubble
pressed against your cheek
in a high school classroom,
Like broken strands of your now fried hair lying at the bottom of your shower drain.
My wrists have a noose around them,
But this is a suicide not a lynching.

When his wife crawls into her bed
at the end of the night,
she won't smell my perfume,
We never go to his room.
I don't want to know
what a marriage bed looks like.
But you have to understand,
This is my choice.
I don't want him to love me,
Nor do I think he ever will.
He loves what I do to him,
What I'll let him do to me,
And that's as much of a connection
as the both of us need.

It always ends with me being called
his *****
by a woman who doesn't know
he's turned on by that word,
But I never break them up.
Either she doesn't leave,
And if she does,
We all 3 know this wasn't my doing.
The rope snapped
And its my skin that is left raw.
Their tension will only make me bleed.

Love will hurt you.
Women like me are a catalyst,
Not a damnation

Sometimes it hits me
that all the anguish,
the disgust,
the numbness,
and ultimate defeat
that I had left behind
will only reignite as I age.

And sometimes,
The though of that
Makes me not want to do it at all.

Dont say it'll be fine
when we both know you're lying

My racetrack mind was never supposed to cross the finish line

I used to pass love notes to the knuckles that cracked against my jaw.
I tucked inside my locket the bruises I thought no one else saw.
You see when your first love is pain,
Being covered in blood
Replaces kissing in the rain.
The last time a lover hit me I was 11,
So by 12 I had started dreaming up ways to get to heaven.
Depression is just a side effect of wanting to die,
But when you're in love with toxicity,
It can be hard to say goodbye.

I'm an addict,
To everything that hurts:
Bruises,
And bulimia,
Men who chase teenage skirts,
But hating myself was the only obsession
That lasted long enough to work.

You see I don't always want to die anymore,
Yet now I feel like I finally lost my mind.
Desperately seeking new ways to pass the time:
Anorexia holds my attention
Until trichotillomania comes
And then moves along,
And once again I'm boring and bored,
But I always swore
a genuine smile was something I'd want.

You are an oasis of rivers
in a barren desert,
The last signs of life,
The remains of a comet
Evaporated in the sun.
You are shattered cords
And spilled ink,
Gloriously painted across broken wires
Split at the seams,
But still breathing.
You are breathing.
So learn to love it.

It absorbs me, you know?
Like a black hole
I fall into a recess,
A void in my mind.
It's like my insides dig their way out,
Surround me,
Dragging the puppet show smile
Into the center,
Hiding it like a bad gift.
I twist out of myself,
The darkest parts come center stage,
The spotlight a stark contrast.
The cold spot of my dreams
Drinking up the light
Turning into every lucid thought
we push aside.
I marry it
Like a death sentence,
Both prey and predator,
A battle along the seams of my skin.
They have to drag me out of it
Like a grave:
I want it badly,
Permanent and aching.

I. I turn into a river around you, so close to drowning you in the regret I pooled in the pit of me. You are gasoline, always splitting me in half when I mean to consume you.

 II. I am swallowing gasoline like butterflies
Hoping the friction of their sinking wings will ignite me
Reveal the fire I've always submerged.

III. But my dear, am I not beautiful covered in flames?

They say when you go through trauma
It either kills you
Or you forget it.
They don't tell you what to do
when the options blend.
There's no hotline to call
when the memories you've buried
claw their way back up your throat
like the pills that didn't work.
I am a causality of a war I never fought in.

I cut my hair short so I can wash it in the sink,
For the days when my shower turns into a tardis I cannot control,
A time machine with only one date.
I have grown sick of not finding refuge in this time and place.
When I shave my head,
I think of how impossible it is to pull a buzzcut.

I write the date on every piece of paper,
But I don't really live here.
The present is just a hideout from the past,
The future a threat of going back.
I am on the run.
A fugitive of broken memories and stolen hope.

I lock each door in my house
five times
before telling my mom goodnight.
I check underneath my bed,
Move the clothes in my closet
until I'm sure I can see every part of the back wall,
and leave its door open.
I bend my eyes into every corner and hollow spot.
I will not go to sleep.
I will dream myself awake.
I wake up in my bathtub time machine,
Raise my face through the surface of the red water,
My long hair wrapping itself around my throat like promises from a time when I still felt alive.
I will probably scream,
And find myself back in my bed.
My family won't hear a thing.

This is me losing my ******* mind
While trying to save it.

I can't remember what the placemats on my kitchen table used to look like,
Or why you hated the word "cauliflower" so much.
I can't recall the arrangement of your irises,
Or which side of me you thought was brighter.
I don't know what your voice sounded like anymore,
Or why the things I want to care about are the things that everyone else keeps telling me don't matter.
But I won't ever lose the way the pitch of your voice rose when I upset you,
but never the volume,
Like a wave fighting too desperately
Against an all too familiar current.

I'm in love with a girl who washes her hair in her bathroom sink every morning.
Truth be told,
She washes it in the kitchen,
But I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea.
Let's backtrack for a minute.
You see she has a shower right behind her
But she hasn't used it since the day the water ran red.
She tells me she likes the way dirt looks under her fingernails,
The way people on the street wonder if she's lazy
Or just excavated a body.
But what's the difference right?
Either way you find yourself in a hole.
I wait for her in the kitchen every morning.
Hand her her coffee.
Watch her stare into the yard as she sips.
I mention the birds
and she sighs something about the night she had to chase away the neighbors cat.
How she wishes her father would stop feeding them.
But you see,
I've heard this story a hundred times.
And though the ending's always different,
Nothing really changes.
Her dad keeps feeding the birds,
And her uncle keeps dying.
Sometimes it's an accident,
sometimes it's a disease.
Either way he ends up in a hole
And her dad only comes home when the birds get hungry.
I picture her sitting cross legged on her grass,
Her eyes envying the way it always shines green,
And I get lost in thoughts of how I'd like to make her my emerald.
But you see she's always wanted to be a diamond,
And there's just not enough warmth in my soul,
Or pressure in my hips
To give her that.
You see she washes her hair in the kitchen sink everyday
Because her best friend killed himself when she was eleven
And let the blood run down the drain.
She dyes her hair the color of a crime scene,
But forgets the caution tape.
She says she hates the mirror in her bathroom and the way the lighting makes her look,
But I've never once seen her bother to open the window.
You see I never minded though
Because the longer she stayed in the dark,
The longer I got to pretend to be her sunshine.

I'm 13 the first time a boy in my class tells a **** joke.
I'm only 13, but it's been 2 years since I learned the seriousness of the thing him and his friends are now laughing at.
2 years since I had my favorite night shirt ripped from my back.
2 years since nails carved scars in my thighs my mother still thinks are from self harm.
2 months since I started blocking it out.

I'm 13 when a girl takes my backpack while I m putting my books in my locker,
Playfully yells over her shoulder,
"***** you".
I laugh.
I don't dare tell her what it's like to remake your bed at 4 in the morning,
Or what it's like to fight back tears when you ask your grandmother for new sheets for Christmas.
To only ever associate the summer heat with what it felt like that night between your legs.

About a year ago I watched the chronicles of Narnia for the first time with my dad.
It was one of my favorites growing up.
He says, "someone should **** that *****" when the witch kills Aslan,
And I stop myself from screaming at him that he had "the talk" with me a little too late,
That I lost my virginity to a man his age when there were still stuffed animals on my bed.
I don't tell him that I still shake when i have to be alone with him even though I know he would never hurt me,
Or that sometimes I still think I deserved it.

I sweat through my shirt everytime I try to write about it.
My best friend says she doesn't care who her first time is, that she just wants to lose it already,
But I wish I could make that choice.
I have lost control of my hands from the shaking when boys have asked me if I was a ****** over text message,
And have locked myself in bathrooms to sob because my sister said boys don't love girls who aren't pure.
I have heard girls called ***** who haven't gone as far as me,
And it feels like arsenic is in my veins everytime someone asks me how I know so much about *** if I haven't had it yet.
Or how my best friend told me she wants to hear about my first time because people still assume that triggers are only on guns,
And that every ******* romance movie is the perfect depiction of what losing your virginity is like.

We don't all get the soft music and the whispered names.
Sometimes you get hands over your mouth and years of ptsd,
Sometimes the I love yous get replaced with "don't wake your parents".
Sometimes I still feel like no boy should ever have to subject themselves to touching me,
For fear they might leave with their hands tainted.

You will never understand fear until you're looking at the boy across the room and thinking about what he'd look like without his clothes on,
Never understand depression until the tile of the bathroom floor is warmer than your thoughts.

I was 13 the first time I heard a **** joke,
And 18 the first time I told someone it wasn't funny.
Because for every second you laugh, I have spent years picking up the shattered pieces of my innocence.
Because it took me 7 years to realize that 20 minutes of not having control will never destroy the 3,681,641 minutes I have spent taking care of myself since it happened.
That the only person who will ever own this body is me.
That no amount of cheap laughs can undo the progress I have made.
So keep laughing.

You always leave out the end.
The part where the dream turns into a nightmare,
When the bodies turn to dust in your hand
Where what you thought were clothes were just threads.
The one where everything shrunk in the wash and all your favorite shirts are too tight on your ribcage.
You'll leave out the end
Hoping it won't come.

I never told you I live a synesthetic life
That we see red differently.
What appears to you as the fires of passion,
I can only see as a burning flame.

You skipped class on all the days a girl came in crying.
You keep drowning in waters that were never meant to hold you
And reaching for the first thing that looks like a lifeboat.
You pretend not to see the cracks in my hull
As if your broken words could ever heal my broken frame.
I pretend not to see the way your eyes still light up at the sound of her name.

Didn't anyone ever tell you you can't make homes out of people?
Why did no one warn you about the danger of resting your head where it cannot permanently lay?
You were the ropes I tied myself to the train tracks with
But all you could see in me was the beginning that the ending of her erased.
 And how can you tell me you understand
When you've only ever looked at me like a paperweight?
I'd hold you down until you were ready to let yourself be used again,
And then you'd leave me to sit and collect dust with all the others who were never enough to put the pieces back together for you.

Someday the end will feel like an accustomed coffin
And though you'll never quite fit comfortably,
You'll let it bury you,
Sitting dully in the dark of the Earth,
And you'll learn to only see the stabbing edges
As another numbing pain.
The apples in your garden will have all turned to snakes.

Roll my body in the rug or bury me under the floorboards.
I'll listen to your footsteps
Like a Heartbeat you swore would mean more if it stopped.
I'll sleep below
While the radio static sings lullabies only you can hear.
Lay me to rest under the floorboards
A funeral for a love never destined to last.
Lay me to rest under the floorboards we danced on,
But don't you dare drown me.

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.

So I guess I've been clinical since the first time I let myself believe you could love me too.

I have yet to find a word that describes the beauty in which an object unravels.
There is, however, infinite words to express the madness one must possess in order to fall in love with destruction.

I do not know why the ruins of hearts I've never known stain my hands like the tar from a fire I never set,
Or why I feel like an arsonist everytime I try to wash the ashes from my fingers,
But I do know that I have said more prayers for the chaotic than for the sick.
I know that while the English language has yet to supply me with a single word to sum up why I find hope in endings,
I can describe in detail the way the walls of my bedroom burn like they are being ravaged by the flames of my psyche,
And how I have never felt more at home than when everything is crumpling around me. 

When I try to explain that I have never felt safer than when my ribs were tearing in two,
Please do not deem me insane.
As if the concept of the deterioration of my own brain has not fascinated me since the first time "we're all mad here" snaked it's way through my consciousness.
I am a white rabbit,
Setting my pocket watch ten minutes fast,
Just to see who will run with me.
Digging holes in my skin,
Hoping someone will fall through.
And if I am mad,
Then you must be too,
For we are all just spilled ink,
Dying to turn blue.

The sky is electric blue
And though it's getting lighter,
It feels like it's getting dimmer.

I can't remember what I said to you the last time we spoke,
But I remember the way your sky blue eyes contrasted my own
which were stained red with rage.
I had never seen you angry and I think that's why I hated you.
Because you were everything I wanted to be but couldn't.
I wanted you to despise me,
Because you were perfect and I was inconceivably flawed,
And the thought of something so pure admiring my tainted soul tasted like shards.
I wanted to crack your glass eyes,
Slit my wrists with the remnants,
Make you understand what happens when you give your heart to someone who doesn't want it.
and though I didn't want you I needed you.
And I know that's a cliche,
But that writer you made me love embraced his so why shouldn't I embrace
Ours?

The trees are black against the now pale sky,
Their silhouettes look the way the tiger stripes of your irises did,
The way your faded scars did against your olive branch skin .
And goddamit why did you have to ruin the sky too?
I'm sick of everything becoming yours
You told me to stop giving myself away to everyone but you just keep taking
Take.
Take it all. 
I don't want it without you.
The electrons in the clouds are sleeping again
They're too tired to keep shocking me with images of your now permanently closed eyes .
And I can't help but wonder if when they sealed your eyes shut
If you were relieved because you had grown tired of trying to light up my permanently dark sky.

I dream in lies
mistellings sealing the creases of my closed eyes.
I wear my truth like a disguise,
purple hearts
shrunken down to size.
I bleed in watercolors,
get high off the galaxy's sighs.
And I dream of a lover,
who'd still love me when he's by my side.

You are the dead air after the joke my friends don't get.
I hear your laugh in the spaces between my family's oblivion and my sanity,
the crevices of pointless conversations.
You are an envelope with no return address.
You are the first person I want to tell about my day.
When my dad asks me how school was, I can only think of how you knew never to ask me that.
They say the nights are hard when no ones in your bed,
but what about when you spend your day in bed because you can't bear another day of activities that don't involve them?
I don't miss you only at 2 am.
I feel the sting of you in the night but you burn me in the afternoons with even greater intensity.
I prefer to be alone because then I only see your smile embedded in my walls rather than the lack of it on everyone else's face.
You are the silence after Wonderwall ends,
you are the lack of " I want to write something like that one day".
I am reminded of you when the girl next to me at a Fall Out Boy concert is sitting on her phone. I know you would scream every lyric with me.
I think that's what hurts, the knowing, especially of the things you aren't here for.
When I cry to "I'm like a lawyer" it's because I will never hear your voice sing it again.
So no, I do not miss you at 2am.
I miss you at 2 pm when I realize that everything I am doing now will never again be done with you

I gave my tormentor the title of best friend
because for once,
it felt like someone saw me the same way I did.
I fell in love with a boy who bruised instead of kissed
because for once,
I didnt have to be the one to beat myself up.

He was a monster
that I so badly wanted to charm
because for once,
it wasn't my problems I was struggling to solve.

I think I've finally run out of ways to poetically say I miss holding you in my arms.

I want to fall in love again,
But only with you.

I watch my best friend's heart break  in front of me.
I watch the way her shoulders roll forward, as if she's hoping her spine will break through her skin.
She wants to be the one to stab her back this time.

And though I can hear the remains of her once perfect heart rattling through her ribcage,
Some part of her still won't let go.
I always rolled my eyes at her confidence, but now I'm left wondering where the hell it went.
She ******* knows better.
I know she does.

She asks me what she should do, and in that moment I want to grab her shoulders.  
I want to beg her.
Beg her not to do this to herself.
Tell her she deserves better.
**** that
I want to scream it at her.
So loud in her face that it echoes out her ears.
I want to yell "**** him"at the top of my lungs.
Because no matter what he says
No one will ever LOVE HER as much as SHE DOES.

I want to show her every scar on my body.
Lift the curtain on the childhood she didn't get to see on our play dates.  
I want to walk her through my memories,
let her feel the regret,
let her feel the way I screamed at 4 in the morning.
I want her to hear the sound of no one answering.

I want her to see loneliness through my eyes.
Feel the hard thud of settling.
To finally know what it's like to rot alone in a casket while you're breathing into your lover's neck.

I want her to know my pain,
in the hopes she will run as fast as she can in the opposite direction.
so that maybe she wont end up like me,
at least not yet.

So when she asks me what she should do,
I tell her
"I should've ran."

They say pain comes in waves
But it always feels more like I'm standing in the rain with you.
All fake smiles and sun showers.

She says he holds her hands like they're daisies.
Remember the time you watched my fingers tremble for three hours?
It was the first time I let you turn me into an earthquake.

She says he won't let go, that's shes afraid he never will.
I don't know if that's a curse or a blessing,
But I do know that when it came from your lips,
it was as a promise.

She says he doesn't really love her.
Explains that he doesn't actually want her,
he just doesn't want anyone else to have her,
As if this is all new to me.
She doesn't see the way my eyes go dark when she says this.
She doesn't know about the J carved into my ribs,
Doesn't know that its been burning me since the day you explained to me how much easier it is to leave than to stay.
And i bet you don't know that leaving has been my trade mark ever since.

She says they're just empty threats,
That he'll get over it, doesn't really mean it.
I try to listen to her speak over the sound of you telling me "I won't ever do it again" over and over somewhere deep in my head.
Somewhere where memories and dreams collide,
A place where the image of you still lives like a photograph I keep trying to burn.

She tells me again about the other boy,
The one who is sweet and soft
Who doesn't mind waiting
and leaves her notes on her car.
She smiles as she talks about him,
And I helplessly watch as the color fades from her face as she tells me she's afraid.

I remember the fear you made me feel.
I remember believing I could never have him as long as I had you.
And no matter how hard I try to forget it all, my biggest regret is never letting him love me because I was too busy loving you.

She uses the word "toxic" and I flinch.
I choke back the taste of your name bubbling at the back of my throat,
Listen to her tell me it's time for her to move on.

I never tell her that seven years later,
I still wake up screaming your name every night.

Stop treating me like I'm the cut on your wrist your sweater just barely covers.
I am so sick of being something your ashamed of.
Your secret, your mistake.
But you know as well as I do that the guiltiest of pleasures are the most rewarding.
Maybe that's why you keep ending up back in my bed
And maybe that's why I keep letting you.

I've got a ghost in my head
His voice sounds the way your nails did
Sliding down my spine.
I've got a ghost in my head
And he keeps asking me why
I didn't let myself die.
I've got a ghost in my head
He keeps knocking on my door.
I've got a ghost in my head
Been there since the day your head
Hit the floor.

There's a little girl
Who keeps talking to me
She says I should let her in.
There's a little girl at my door
Wants to know what she did.
There's a little girl
Got a lot of questions
She wants to know why I stay hid.
There's a little girl
And shes perfect
No ones ever broken her rib.
There's a little girl
She's living in a time before
Your head ever broke
Against my bedroom floor.

We were two severely broken things
and though I was promised someone to mend me
I couldn't bear to get better before you.
so I replaced all your lost pieces with my own
and glued you back together with the blood I lost from slicing my hands when I touched you.
And when you were whole again
you decided there weren't enough parts in the world to fix me
and even if there were, I wasn't worth the effort.
And now I am even more broken than before
and there aren't enough pieces  for anyone else to mend me with
and I wonder if you ever touch your wrist and feel my veins under your skin
or look at your eyes and see my glass shining through.
Because I can feel every piece I lost
and every time my mother hugs me she asks me about the crater between my shoulder blades
that piece went to your ribs i think
and every ******* time you get hurt I know
because I can ******* feel it
and I can feel her cold fingers on my neck every time she touches your leg and I just want my ******* pieces back.

The way wink sounds more like wince under six feet of dirt.

Sorry.
Five simple letters with the ability to twist my tongue into a jigsaw no **** kid would have the audacity to crack.
I'm sorry for never telling you I loved you.
I'm sorry I was so fixated on being destroyed that I couldn't comprehend that you could have kept me safe.
I'm sorry I check my heartbeat like clockwork,
But the aftermath of every close call is a permanent feeling of running out of time.
I apologize for holding your hand like your skin could possibly be anything but desirable to me.
Truth be told
I always liked the way you felt like an inside-out cigar.
I miss the way you breathed my pain like it was second hand smoke.
I'm sorry all I had to offer you was a busted frame and a hollow interior.
And I'm sorry I was too afraid to even give you that.
I'm sorry I treated your patience like a burden
For making you believe your smile was something I could choke on.
You were my proof that happiness doesn't only come in pill form
And I've been trying to drown these butterflies you left running through my head.
I killed the ones in my stomach the first time you put your arm around me.
I'd give anything to have them back.

I want to rewind it all.
I'm watching the snow fall out my window and I can't help but daydream about catching it on my tongue all those years ago.
Back when I'd breathe onto windows so I could draw pictures, back when the whole world was my canvas.
It seems the whole world's already been colored in though, like there's no more room left for us dreamers.
I read a poem in junior high asking where dreams go, but now I care more about where the dreamers went.
I want to rewind it all.
Back to when I thought the sky was another world's ocean,
Back before I had ever heard the word stratosphere or had failed a biology test.
I want life to be recorded on a VCR, little green and red buttons putting my mind at ease.
Then again, I haven't owned a VCR in years...

I carry my backpack, and the addition thirty pounds of stress that goes along with it.
I carry an MP3 player, filled with 1500 songs that make more sense to me than any math lesson ever has.
I carry a necklace from the 1800's that no one in my family cares enough about to remember who it originally belonged to. We both carry the feeling of being passed along.
I carry a notebook with letters I'll never have the nerve to send. I carry a pen that's been through more with me than any of my friends.
I carry my scraped knees and a tendency to fall to the waste side.
I carry my father's temper like a hot coal in the pit of my stomach. I carry his high expectations and my mother's victim complex. All three of which are, apparently, hereditary.
I carry Chapstick, Neosporin, and band-aids. Because things crack, and things break, and some things tend to cut.
I carry the same mindset as an Oxford comma and a worry of being replaced. We both carry the feeling of not really mattering.
I carry my uncle's divorce, & the way we buried him only a year after the papers were signed. I carry the way his ex wife's grudge is stronger than her children's love for their family.
I carry the dream catcher my dad keeps in his room, the one I got rid of years ago when I realized nothing would keep my nightmares away.
I carry the time my hero had his heart broken and spent the next year at the bottom of a bottle.
I carry the headstone that marks the beginning of my abandonment issues.
I carry a .037 fl oz tube of eyeliner in the hopes that no one will mess with a girl who always looks like she has two black eyes.
I carry a pre-med major that will never make me as happy as it will make my parents. I carry my family's hopes on my back & the way I feel like an emergency room with no more room left for patients.
I carry my best friend's name like an obituary I never got to read. I carry the way his head hit his windshield faster than it ever hit my lap, and the way I've hated sitting in the driver's seat ever since. I carry the way I never want to be invited to another funeral & the way each body they've buried makes me feel like I'm already 6 feet under.
I carry the mattress I slept on as a child. Pink flowers & blue satin & cold sweats detergent couldn't fade. The one I spent an entire afternoon scrubbing bloodstains out of, hoping my mother wouldn't notice when she changed the sheets. She never did, or at least she never asked, and sometimes I still wish she had.
I carry how my friend thinks her high school boyfriend breaking up with her is the worst that could happen, and the way I hope she always does.

I've been trying to figure out where to start with you.
It's like trying to put a pinpoint on a city that doesn't exist anymore.
I'm always looking at a faded map when it comes to you.
Maybe that's why I start all my sentences with "and"
and maybe that's why I haven't gotten a good nights sleep in 3 years.
Beginnings have always evaded me.
I've never cared for small talk or formalities.
The "oh that's nice" that seems to line the purse that is every first conversation.
The pin fell out of the wall again,
the map's crumpled on the floor.
It looks the way I imagine your body did.
Your body.
My bed.
And a highways worth of empty space.
Your body.
I didn't need another parking lot.
I needed a **** highway but you had to go and ruin that.
Your body.
I have driver seat phobia.
They say I fear control but what they don't understand is that I fear being out of control.
The same way you don't fear the dark,
you fear not seeing.

Your body. Six feet of dirt. Parking lots.

I'm so sick of having my foot on the brake.
I swear every steering wheel has the word "and" etched into.
The seams of the leather.
The stitches in your head.
I can't start a car or a sentence.