I sat alone
I ate alone
I walked alone
I existed alone

Yet now you stand here waiting for us to

Seat together
Eat together
Walk together
Exist as one

I stay awake through the night
Chipping at my nails
The blood around reminds me to ask
"Why do you love me?"
The half moon lingering on my skin yet not masking the scars and marks

This noose is my only friend in the world now

I will miss you at college, I really will.
I won’t miss the wrinkled brows, at my too-heavy-eyeliner wearing face.
But i’ll probably come home make up free
with a head full of purple hair.
I know i’ll walk through the door sometime and you’ll be horrified.
And maybe you won’t want to sit in Starbucks with me.

And when your friends are bragging about their daughters,
saying mine got a full ride to Notre Dame,
or mine was recently proposed to,
you’re going to say,
“mine is happy.”
And maybe that will be enough.

I can't turn my sadness into beauty.  
I try and try and try but the truth is,
there's a certain kind of darkness
and a certain kind of evil
that can't be romanticized into a poem.
Not all feelings can be explained by vomiting up random words into a
college ruled note book paper.
We use words to make our suicidal thoughts sound normal.
Sound acceptable. Sound beautiful.
But suicide is none of those things.
So stop putting the idea of suicidal solutions into the minds of 13 year old boys and girls.
We constantly tell kids that suicide is not the answer,  yet we make the idea seem so appealing.
We paint a pretty picture of
slit wrists
coke lines
anti depressants
hospital beds
and grave stones.
But they are not works of art.
They are grey and cold and empty.
So stop using shades of red, yellow and pink, stop describing the warmth of pain, the way drugs and sliced skin fills your emptiness.
Tell it how it really is.
Instead of writing how good each cut feels, try writing about how bad it actually hurts. how its an addiction.
Instead of writing about the freedom you feel while high, try writing about the way you feel when you come down.  The way the pain crawls right back up your throat,  the way drugs actually ****** up your entire life.
Instead of writing about your sweet dreams of death,  the beautiful idea of taking your own life,
Try writing about the fact that you are terrified to die.  That you want so badly to live. That you don't want to give up.
Stop making the hurt you feel sound cool and trendy.
Tell the world what it's truly like
because lately people have sewn the words
"Beauty" and "pain" into a cute little pink sweater in white lace.

If people were art,

You would be a page from a child's coloring book
hanging on the refrigerator.
Different colors filling the page.
An explosion of
red, orange, yellow,
green, purple and blue.
Everything leaking out of the lines you were meant
to contain yourself in.
A green sun and yellow grass,
none of it makes much sense.
And that is exactly what makes you
worth looking at.

But if people were art,

I would be a watercolor that got too wet,
and now the paper is wrinkled
and the picture distorted.
The paint bleeding into itself,
as the paper starts to tear.

I don't understand the word ‘love’ because
when I was 13 years old I was forced to believe in it as my brother shoved the wrong definition between my thighs.