I don’t know how to start this story
Because I don’t know how I got here

One day
I woke up to find myself surrounded by ruins
And
Cracked ribs
Wondering if there were
Cracks in the foundation
I should have seen from the get-go

It feels empty to scream at
Tumbled bricks
But that’s all I have these days
So their weary edges have heard all my woes now
All the things I’ve lost
The life I thought I would have
Before it turned to dust in my hands

It is such a funny thing
Waking up each day now
And walking around as though my existence isn’t
Straddling a fault line
My bones feel ready to shatter from the
Strain
Of holding myself together
Little crackling noises following me
As I wonder if this is the day
My skeleton finally submits to the dust

I should have seen this coming
Should have known better than to throw my life
Wide open
On a wager
And a schoolboy’s whim
But it all seemed so shiny
So breathtaking
And I never stopped to think about the day
I’d grow sick of gasping for air
Nor the realization that I’d been clutching
Pyrite
All along

So I guess this is a story
Of what a glittering fool I’ve been
Always offering the best of myself
To those who would **** it dry
Never seeing the warning signs
Convinced
This
Time
Will
Be
Different
Even as the bricks around me come crashing down

I have sat hiding a shattered heart too many times
Biting back words
I wish I'd been brave enough
To shout
To scream out selfish truths
**** the consequences
Instead of worrying about everyone else's feelings
But my own

I let the tide sweep me along

You set me on fire once
And I got so scared
I nearly drowned myself
Preferring the waves that threatened to swallow me
As long as they kept dragging me away

Despite miles and miles of ocean, I can still smell smoke

We've left too many things unsaid
And said too many things too late
And I've screamed and heaved a thousand sobs
Across leagues of empty space
Berating myself in turns for being a coward
And a naive fool
And yet
I still can't help but wonder
When you say, "Nothing will have changed,"
Are you referring to the flames?

This is the loose thread I can't help but pull
Even as I watch the unraveling
I can't stop
Can't convince my fingers to still their fidgeting

This is my self-destructive nature
The urge to poke and poke at bruises
To endlessly stick my tongue in the bleeding chasm of a missing tooth
To pick and scratch and needle at everything that
Hurts

This hour
And the next
And the next and the next and the next
I will stare at my phone, crestfallen
Wishing against all hope for your name
Sending desperate messages into the ether
Opening old wounds that I'll never let heal
Praying for the sense to finally let you go

She's lost in wilds unexplored
     Far from dreamers' shining lands
In misty moors where even Sleep
     Lets fall his useless magic sands
There is no rest for mortals here
     For fools who play where Faeries tread
On Faerie roads, in Faerie lands
     The world is turned upon its head
Her stride is sure, yet she is not
     Perception is the Faeries' game
Sending visions, glamours, ghosts
     Illusions wailing out her name
A fearful girl along the roads
     Will bargain for most anything
And here, the threshold of Lost Hope
     Is purview of the Raven King
The Raven King! The Raven King!
     She fell in wonder at the sight
As castles grew before her eyes
     And wild dark turned blinding bright
He led her to the winding halls
     She rushed down cobbles Faeries tread
She gulped the dizzying Faerie wine
     And took the proffered Faerie bread
They swept her up in swirling dance
     For frenzied days, she whirled along
In drunken time, she stumbled to
     The beat of Faerie's wild song
And, wilder still, her heart would drum
     Excited in the glittered haze
As Fae lay stardust in her eyes
     And drew her with their feral gaze
But wait--why did her weary bones
     Resist the Fae's beguiling thrall?
Even as her mind was pulled to
     Pirouette the Endless Ball
Dissonance--a spell had snapped
     She scrabbled at the gilded walls
"Is this to be my cage?" she called
     Across the King's ethereal halls
She couldn't sleep; she couldn't rest
     Paced and fretted, cried aloud
But she had bargained, drunk the wine
     And for the Raven King now bowed
"You made the bargain, mortal girl
     You said the words and you were bound
You called out for the Raven King
     When you were lost on Faerie ground."
She'd never known the ancient laws
     The tricky ways of binding rites
The way the Fae could draw you in
     With silvered tongue and phantom sights
The Faeries laughed; the Faeries danced
     They brought her back under their spell
She didn't fight--their dazzling daze
     Was better than a living hell
So there she stays, a wayward girl
     Heartsick, lost, and trapped in Fae
A fearful girl along the roads
     Who bargained her whole life away

Is this what the beginning of a
Psychotic break
Feels like?
More enamored with fiction than reality
Walking up at 5 am with
Tachycardia
And the weight of an elephant squeezing your chest so
It's impossible to
Breathe
The past seems more real than the present and the
Present
Seems muted except for the
Anxiety
And
Despair

I am falling endlessly

I don't know where the bottom is

I don't know how to bring myself back

Meandering in broken fantasies
Listless
Aching for every intangible hypothetical
Heartbroken over fictions
And more heartbroken still
That even the glittering shards of dashed dreams
Will outshine my weary reality

The physical therapist said
To imagine I was tearing the floor
Apart
With my feet

It wasn't hard to imagine

Every day feels like an exercise in
Self-control
In order to keep myself from shredding everything around me
To keep myself from
Jumping out of my skin
To keep myself
Tame
Despite the unending roaring pressing on my skull