my heart beats fast & my hands shake
i should have stayed at home today
i try to escape my own mind
tug at my clothes & count the time
i can't sit still but i can't move
my mascara runs more than i do

I Don't know anyone anymore,
It's like they've grown up without me.
I wasn't a missing link,
But only a useless one.

A wave of grey
A surge of anxiety

What was I doing here
Do I recognised this place

A dark cocoon
A low rising mist
A location only I hold

The lonely, heavy pull
Was this life

Alone with  my mind
A dangerous predicament
A choice I have not made

Can you hear my screams
Or are they muffled like my mind  

I see no route ahead
The path is fading quickly

I hold the rail
Longing for direction

No one sees me
There's no one here

I look up at the world above
Will I one day be taken there!!?

As I open the door

The cold engulfs me first
raising hairs on my neck, shivers down my spine, prickles on my scalp

Next the smell
so mild, pleasant, crisp. similar to rain or dew
my lungs take in this air for the first time

The light begins to peek over the mountains
clearing the fog, cutting away the dark

The quiet is both a comfort and an uneasiness
Only the earth under my feet whispers as I walk the dirt path

The lake unblemished, like a mirror for the sky to look upon
no wind, no waves, no life

standing there, absorbing the surroundings
I am the one to break the silence, to shatter the utopia
as I drop the pebble in the waters…

these ripples go on                                                              *­Forever

I will leave this house in a year.
Before next Christmas it will be surrounded
by monstrous yellow machines
and fat, grimy men in white hard hats.

My home will crumble into dust
like bones done aging—brittle and tired now.
And what once stood will no longer remain:
a white stucco box of memories,
photographs and heritage tucked within the walls.

I will run away to Chicago
taking comfort in drags of cigarettes.
Our lives will have no evidence, no proof
of ever breathing, laughing and crying
in every room that welcomed us.

My mother will leave for the countryside,
somewhere with fewer people and dimmer lights,
to make room for cornfields and starry skies.
Maybe there she will find peace.

I will be there when the swinging mechanical arm
tears away at the shingles and panels of this house.
She is a dying friend and I am a hand in her hand,
assuring her she isn't alone in death,
that I will remember her when the world forgets.
I will scoop up ashes of pulverized concrete and iron.
Somewhere within them will be air we breathed.