She is now all elbows and bird limbs
Eating her ever smaller
Hearing her cry in the night ****** nails on a chalk board
I want to hold her help her
Be the rescue swimmer in her ocean of tears
Holding for I am soft
Her daughter no fine specimen
A coward
A softy
Not once did she hold me
In seventh grade when I had my first kiss and he broke up with me for the girl with blonde hair and bangs
She said I was just too young
In eighth grade I fell in lust with a high school boy for the first time and ended it when I got bored but not before I gave him what i thought symbolized love.
I didn't tell her
In 9th grade I fell in love with a boy that would never be able to love me the way I wanted him to. But I stayed  for four years until I couldn't find any more of myself to break off and give to him.
She told me I would get over it.
I have a mother who the world made cold
And she had a daughter that felt too much
who she taught feeling was a waste of time

You were my foreword.
Everything that happened between us those four years were before the chapters began.
Every word leaned on the previous, piling together sentences that would sculpt the story
Stacking syllables to create a foundation
Counting apostrophes to prevent grammatical catastrophe.
But One was misplaced
And the tale compiled uneven
Backspace doesn't exist in this
And the story line is still not right

Hey babe.. Or maybe hey stranger is more applicable..
Because there is a lot of room for change in 619 days..
And enough time for a life where “you and I” existed to become past tense leaving two
individuals tied together by nothing but fragile strings of memories that will inevitably fade
enough to be painted over by a brighter color
Anyway,
I woke up last night gasping for air
Reaching for the ghost of you
Choking on the memory of how you made me feel whole
Sometimes I find myself wishing I had stayed home that night
Begging my brain to forget the first time I saw your smile
Or how your lips moved when you called me by the wrong name
My name you have since said thousands of ways and perfected in every tone
But I can't forget
I can't let go of the little things like how the freckles that pepper your shoulders get darker in the
summer
Or the story behind every scar
One night you traced a map to our future across my skin with black ink claiming there would be
no end
But the marker wasnt permanent
Eventually washing away
leaving me lost
screaming pleas of take me backs
Trying to retrace my steps
Waiting on something that has already disappeared

5 years and 1 month
that's 61 months
that's a total of 1,855 days
of me waking up next to the smell of you
a smell that will forever linger in my nose

I learned that this is called the Proust effect
certain scents bypass the brains thalamus and go directly to the smell center
causing them to trigger the most vivid memories and emotions

on that note

I found your shirt the other day
as I was trying to purge any evidence of you from my life
But I could not toss it aside before holding it to my face and inhaling your all too familiar smell

as the scent filled my nose
the flashbacks began

and now I can't sleep

thinking you were different was my crime

every night you stole from me like a waste of time

Recently I heard someone say that getting butterflies is a red flag
but when our eyes met across the bar
everything in a foggy haze of Captain and Coke
I didn't get butterflies
it was more like a swarm of wasps
trying to escape as the words rose up to find their way out of my mouth
Stinging my throat along the way

This should have been a warning

I've never been good at reading signs

You met my shadow
A monster that has been lying dormant for years
Just waiting to come out and take over

You met my shadow
The thing I tried so hard to hide and protect you from
Because I knew it would scare you away

You met my shadow
“She” appeared from the deepest hell inside of me
When I felt my world was crashing down
Taking advantage when I was weak

You met my shadow
For that I am sorry

And I don’t blame you because
When “she” comes out of the darkness
All I want is to run away too

I am not using her as an excuse
merely wanting you to understand that “she” is not me