I am made up of lightning storms and dry tear ducts fighting through your sweaty palms and storm drains.

My hand rails can’t support your heavy words and even graver thoughts.

You can unwind years’ worth of therapy
and medication with a single sentence.

The looks you give me are almost
as disturbing as hearing the pills
I swallow dancing down the back
of my throat. I know they’re supposed
to help, but I feel implacable.

I am better off alone. You don’t/didn’t love me. I will not beg you to do so. And though I will miss holding hands during car rides, seeing each other after class, calming you down from test anxiety, and morning hello kisses, I will be okay. Instead of telling myself I would do them better with you if I got a second chance, I will find them with someone else. I treated you too well. I am better off alone.

Cold hotel rooms during childhood family vacations
Looking for the peace and direction that never was
Feigning the pleasant vision of relationships
Longing to return to where everything was familiar
Despising the idea of society-influenced normality
Refusing any form of participation in your delusions
Falling asleep to do it all over again tomorrow.
I lie awake in my bed alone and older
But nothing else has changed.

I.
If friendships make better relationships, we would have been the best. But care can’t be unbalanced. That being said, I don’t think about you anymore, and that is probably my greatest victory.

II.
I frequently messed up work because you were set in front of me. It wasn’t my fault I had something more engaging to think about. I didn’t mind being called out except that it might’ve lowered your thoughts of me. If that hadn’t done it, I had to do it myself because I ruin every good thing.

III.
To every sweet and sour pair of lips I’ve kissed, thank you for leading me to find my current pair.

IV.
Retreat.

I offered you everything and you tore it apart like you’d never been loved before
You left me with nothing to give so I could never be loved again

I don’t want to be happy with you.
I think neither of us deserves it
& I want to drag you down,
even (especially) if I go down with you.

Maybe we’d find happiness together
while we’re there. Better yet,
maybe we’d find it for ourselves
so that we won’t have to be together.

While everything continues falling
into place, we lead our own lives
pretending not to know each other
because we don’t need one another
until we’ve started falling.

Sometimes, it’s the past that won’t
leave us alone. During those times
I wonder how you’re doing and I
really want to speak to you but I won’t.

Love songs are either about “heartbreak” or “the one.” What do you listen to when you’re somewhere in between?

It’s racing through my mind. I can’t see those hands without picturing where they’ve been with what intentions. It brings the old friend Anxiety back; it makes me pull the hair out of my head; it makes me scrub my skin until it’s bright red. I don’t know makes me think this way– why you would be the villain and not me.

I don’t want flowers; they do nothing

but blacken and deteriorate and remind me

of my insides and everything they lack.

I want support, comfort, reconciliation,

and false reassurance that will

make me believe (even for a second)

that I’m not actually deranged,

unstable, and hopeless.

Lie to me. Tell me I’m sane, tell me

I’m worth it, and tell me I can bounce back

from this mood I seem to have been

stuck in since the beginning of my time.

Make me feel like the weight of the world

might be less heavy when you’re near

because you might want to carry

some of it with me.

You once asked me why I even liked you.
I started rattling off the usual answers:
You’re funny, you’re sweet, etc.
What I should’ve said is:
You feel like home.
The only problem is:
The home I know is full of fighting.
Full of lying. Full of pushing and pulling.
Home is not safe. Neither were you.

I can see the two of you
together
and I am shaken.

How does she taste?
As her voice brings back memories,
is she easier to digest?

I can read her, you know.
I know that when she has scissors in her hands,
she allows her fingertips to dance about the blades.
I know that when she’s taking herself home,
she considers making a quick stop between the tracks.
I know that when she speaks to you,
she’s not trying to help herself;
she’s trying to gain confirmation of what she already knows:
there is no way out.

I also know that, as you run your eyes through her,
your voices match a love song you once knew.

So while I wait for you to finish her,
I must know:
as her expression inevitably handles
a muddled past you’re trying
so desperately to pretend
didn’t exist,

is she easier to digest?

It’s true you never left me alone —
you left me with EVERYTHING

I desperately don’t want to live in the past, but I’m equally terrified of my future.

Depois do nosso lance, não quero mais amar ninguém.
Não por ter sido bom, mas por ter sido péssimo.

---

After our affair, I don't want to love anyone else.
Not because ours was good, but because it was excruciating.

You’ll never know what’s going on inside my brain
I’m not that girl anymore
Who writes poems from the inside to match new scars on the outside
And you’re lucky
You’ll never wake up to a new post about my ****-ups
Or get a call begging you to stop them from happening
I’m not that girl anymore
I wasted that on the wrong person
I gave up
And you’re lucky

When I have so much of no feeling
that it turns into apathy, I’m told
to believe that it’s my mental health
playing tricks on me again. But what
if this is just who I’m destined to be?
No one wants to figure out what’s
wrong with me, so they feed me
antidepressants, antipsychotics,
anxiety medication, and mood
stabilizers until I stop complaining.
What if they’re just shutting me out?
Like the ocean pulling back, my eyes
are reaching out for help. If you
can’t be that, all you see is the
empty waters. What’s really there
is all of the casualties of the storm.

I was just trying to get the sad out of my veins.

Does it count as being stuck in the past if I don’t count my steps anymore? I’ll take your word for it as long as I don’t have to look up.

When breathing will only bring pain,

The kind of pain that is emotional,

You have no choice that seems rational

But to exert all force to feign

Some sort of spirit that seems real

To everyone around you.

Only the slightest few

Will understand how you really feel.

That small percentage of folk

Might even only include one

Who will straighten your backbone

And your right to whine revoke.

Forever you’ll have someone to defend,

As she has become your best friend.

I wrote a poem in my sleep last night.
It was about how we feign flexibility
just to hide our jealousy;
how a night of drinking is supposed to soothe years of neglect
and a day of headaches is supposed to pound out the sad.

I don’t remember the poem, but I remember it related to
your sorries and goodbyes.
It related to how they left just as quickly and silently as you did.

And I’m still waiting for them like an idiot,
waiting for the rain in the drought and the food in the famine.
As if I deserve some kind of closure that really doesn’t matter.

Love is a social construct. That isn’t to say you don’t feel it. A decades-old concept of romance has been shoved down your throat since childhood.

When you’re with someone and it’s real, you know it. Real relationships aren’t stereotypical; if your significant other really knows you, they will find better ways to cherish you than roses and chocolates. Real relationships are built from two separate personalities. They’re custom-made. Real relationships don’t fit into a box, so why do we keep insisting there’s only one way to “love?”

No one’s definition of love is the same– no one feels love the same way. Yet, in a conversation about it, you think you’re on the same page. I think this respective feeling transcends that word. I think it’s sad that we all try to express our own separate, unique feeling with the same three words.

I could activate volcanoes with this anxiety, but the heat between you two could do much worse.

The roads and the hills are no match for phone lines and heavy words misguiding stolen innocence.

I can’t be your guiding stars because I’m too busy watching the light show she puts on around you.

Depression has nothing to do with sadness.

What they don’t tell you is that Depression is a sunny summer day and a dying autumn tree at the same time. It’s a new job while taking six classes, but it’s also a day trip to a crowded amusement park. Depression can be a tall building peeking through the fog during your first airplane ride. Sometimes it’s just the accumulated hair you have to yank out of your old hairbrush.

Most of all, Depression is having involuntarily wasted the last four hours of my life in bed and worrying that’s not all of it that’s passed me by.

You don’t hate me
But of course you don’t
I didn’t blame you for your intrusive thoughts
I didn’t rip your innocence out of your hands
I didn’t claim your issues were personal attacks on me
I didn’t invalidate your experience
You have no reason to hate me

I am the one left with hate when all I wanted was to love
The pain, distress, confusion all rolled into one
No other way to express my emotions
I’ve become a shell of who I used to be
I’ve become a fraction of a human being
It’s the hate that fuels me
To be better than us, better than you

You hit me even harder than depression does, but it’s my eyes that swell and not my cheek. Our waves of emotion are goodbyes, not hellos, that turn into maybes at best. I’m careful to pick light, non-provocative words that fill up balloons to meet the clouds. They float away like nothing ever happened and like nothing ever will happen.

I see those bright eyes
That squinted toward me when we were younger,
Admiring my wet hair and eyeing my exposed legs;
There are those locks that brushed up
Against my cheeks when I least expected it;
And that soothing voice that made my
Hips stir and my wrists sore.

We don’t even care
To bring the past up because
What’s done is done and
We must move on, right?
We’re adults now and adults need not
Share what’s on their minds. It’s written as clearly
On my face as the wind that played
With the leaves on my front porch while you fiddled
With my hair and with my heart.

I’m a righter – not a fighter.

Things will end how they may
But I securely believe
That some day
You lot will leave;
Every mismatched rhyme
And unknown connection
Will have its time
Shrugging off all signs of affection
Therefore dismissing any reason
That might reside in that mind
And I will ease on
To erase all memory of your kind.

I won’t choose this as my battle
Because I know where it ends –
It’ll inevitably shatter
And these shards don’t tend
To smooth themselves out,
Nor will you take it
Upon yourself to try a differing route –
A new escape – but the same ****.

So I’m left wondering why
It’s always my job to make it right.