I can't find my head.

two coffees
shaking hands
racing pulse
cancelled plans

cold apartment
lonely tears
boring reruns
empty beers

quiet room
unmade bed
took all the pills
now she’s dead

There's an F on his forehead but it doesn't represent failure. It represents the Y chromosome his father didn't pass down but by some cruel twist of fate he so desperately need to be comfortable in his own **** skin. But this isn't about that. This is about that little girl you raised realizing that she was always meant to be a little boy but can't tell you because you'd kick him out regardless of how he'd plead for you to just understand so instead he hurts himself to let the feeling out. Dozens of little lines that relieve his pain for just a moment each but it is just enough to keep him going. And then he comes back to the constant fear and sometimes he can't take it so he buries himself in a reality where he can be who he is. The wrong pronouns that taste like acid on his tongue and sound like screams in his ears and just add salt to the wounds that he's given himself. He wants to tell you everything but you'd throw him to the dogs and watch as he was torn apart. So he filets his skin instead, and for sixteen years he's held it all in. Sixteen years of pain and suffering and not knowing and hurting. How many times does he need to bleed before I feel like he's had enough? How many times will he scream before someone comes to help? To save him? Because he might not be able to stand it much longer. I won't be able to.

You were gone.
It wasn't gradual,
more like a rush
of breath out of your
worn-down lungs.
I cried and begged
for my father
to bring you back
or to come sit with me
but he would not budge.
Your SON would not
comfort his grieving child.
Did you raise him
to be so apathetic?

walk
slowly
          as dread
   settles against your
  liver
   making your steps
echo inside
   what feels like
        an empty breath
and the door
opens
   against your will
       you want to turn tail
and
run
run
run

Sometimes it feels like I’m looking a stranger or maybe even a ghost in my mirror. Dark eyes with no sparkle stare back at me and part of me wonders when I started looking like a corpse. Meals get skipped more often than I actually eat and my body starts feeling like it’s made of glass that people keep breaking while she tries her hardest to put me back together. And when I get sick, because it always happens, it’s like my bones rattle as I shiver and each cough feels like my throat is being torn apart from the inside out and after each fit I try to be surprised that there’s no blood. When I’m asked about medical history I have to tell them I don’t know because I really don’t. I’m so stupidly afraid of getting some preventable but hereditary disease because I never knew it was in my genes. I find myself turning the same words over and over in my head while I lay in bed every night: they didn’t want you and they didn’t love you and it’s your fault. It’s gotten to the point where I believe the lies my anxiety-ridden subconscious tells me. The logical part of me knows the lies aren’t true but how do you console yourself in those lonely hours when you’re alone and no one can hear you cry yourself to sleep? Six nights a week it’s all fitful sleep and when I wake up I’m still so exhausted it takes everything I have just to haul myself out of bed to take the pill that makes it so I can just barely scrape by during school and even then it’s not good enough so I find myself failing and then I realize I just don’t care anymore. There is no in between for me, I can’t just kinda care it’s all or nothing and ninety nine percent of the time it’s nothing so I lose myself in my video games and ignore the screaming in the back of my skull that tells me to get up and do something productive with my life but I just can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to try it’s that I physically cannot make myself care enough to do anything and it’s almost like I can ******* feel my muscles begin to atrophy.

there is sadness, yes
but not in the breath-
stealing sobs you
            expect.

it comes in quiet
      absence

in the sound of the shower
with no music to
drown
        it
     out

in the loss of laughter
        between
smiles    and words

and

in the way weight
     shifts   to avoid
     touching  m o r e
        skin than necessary

There are too many things I regret telling you, darling. I regret telling you about how when I was little I nearly died in the accident that totaled my parents' Jetta. I regret mentioning that I felt like your Halloween costume was more important to you than I was. I regret that you let me convince you to help you clean your ******* room so I could feel important. I regret every tear I've made you shed and your pain is carved into my brittle bones so I know just how much I've hurt you. Honestly, I've started to realize how much of a miracle it is that you haven't changed your mind about loving a broken and battered shell of a human being wearing a smiling mask that comes off so slowly it peels away what's left of my pale, flaking skin. I'm surprised you're still interested in my thinning body and tattered soul. My name falling from your lips in ecstasy still sounds so foreign, like hearing a language you never even knew existed. You look at me like I hang the moon in your night sky, making me feel unworthy of the way you treat me, not like a broken toy but rather an ancient heirloom to be treasured and mended. I find myself tossing and turning at night wondering and worrying and whittling away at the fragile self confidence I build when I'm with you and I ******* regret. I regret not opening up and I regret the indisputable fact you could do so much better than me. There are still so many things I regret and letting you read this is one of them but these are all things you need to know and my heart is still in pieces beneath our feet. Yes, there will always be things I regret, but loving you will never be one of them.

chocolate fills
the gaps
between
my soul
and the
places
   their hands
   press
cotton
candy
bruises
into
milky flesh
while
strawberry
syrup
pools
  on
   the
    floor
and the
    ginger ale
that oozes
from
agonized
eyes
    burns their
      faces into
  my retinae