I have always wished for someone to treat me delicately / and it has taken me far too long to come to realize that maybe the best place to start would be with myself.

I have come to realize that there is not a single place on earth that I feel I belong. / I wander from person, to place, to thing, without ever feeling connected. / feeling homeless. / perpetually wandering / it is as if I'm always trying to get back to this familiar safe place I believe I "should" have / but every time I go to ask for directions, I can't get the words out and I realize I've lost my voice.

I walk around feeling like a bullet wound. / like I am shot full of holes and always bleeding out. This is the type of pain that you can never find reprieve from. / I put my love and trust in a number of emotional assasins. / Well disguised as friends and lovers. / Then, in one fell swoop a wrecking ball was taken to the entirety of my life. / I quietly collected the salvagible pieces and receeded off into the shadows. / I have been clutching the shattered fragments close to my chest ever since. / sometimes it draws blood. / sometimes it makes it hard to breathe.

I don't think I have a broken heart / I think I am a broken heart

the people that seem the most impossible to love are ironically, those most desperately in need of it / in its most unconditional of forms.

I sometimes feel like there are anchors tied to my ankles,
Made up of every moment I wish I could forget,
And just when I am sure I'll be able to tread water long enough to make it safely back to shore,
I am pulled further out to sea,
Betrayed by the weight of my own experience.

you keep waking up covered in fragmented memories and your own spilled secrets.
it makes getting out of bed feel like waging a war.

depression is letting too many days go by without watching the sunset.
depression is shying away from the embrace you desperately want.
depression is convincing yourself that your self perpetuated isolation is somehow beneficial.
depression is hardly being able to tell the difference between the time you spend asleep and the time you spend awake.
depression is feeling startled by the sound of your own voice.
depression is convincing yourself that there is something inherently wrong, and broken within you.
depression is forgetting to handle yourself with care.
depression is a divorce from self love.
so yes, depression is a lot of things,
but it is not insurmountable.
I watched the sunset tonight.

I stopped believing in myself
and everything else
the day I realized that love is like currency,
a currency that, despite my sincerest efforts, I have never been able to work hard enough to earn

you carved our names into a tree as the sun took its final bow and turned everything it could reach golden and warm.
I thought to myself "these are the kind of moments that people write about".
but you see, the bark of that old willow tree was the lining of my heart,
and the stone you used to so carefully etch our initials was just a handful of promises you never intended to keep.
so I guess after all, at least I was right. these are the kind of moments that people write about, but never for the reasons we first expect.

my heart never seems to be where I am

coffee stains,
frayed jeans,
and never quite being what you need

have you ever wondered what it would be like to do one thing perfectly

just one thing

I've run out of beautiful metaphors to dress up the terrible things that have happened to me.

I can't make these wounds sound pretty;
and my arms sometimes forget to hold me together.
I've dropped pieces of myself along the way,
leaving a trail of hidden heart ache.

And now I can't decide if I've become a haunted house or a natural disaster.

a girl with a hollowed out chest,
all empty space and hopelessness.
carrying handfuls of apologies and half hearted explanations never spoken out loud.

desperate attempts to fill the spaces left by every shattered promise,
ribs fractured by deception and lungs collapsing from abandonment;
it's hard to take a breath while drowning in self perpetuated silence.

Unintentionally hurting someone does not excuse you from causing that hurt.
Intention is important, but it isn’t everything.

My circumstances are mine to manage,
this is true.
But that doesn’t mean it isn't overwhelmingly unfair to be handed this broken vase of a life and be told that it is now mine to piece back together.
I didn’t do this all to myself.
I didn’t get to this place alone.
I wasn’t driving the car that caused the crash,
but I was sitting in the passenger seat.
So no, technically speaking the injuries I sustained weren’t my fault, but they are now mine to deal with;
mine to take care of;
it's my responsibility to heal the wounds I didn’t inflict,
simply because I didn’t know any better than to get in the car.
I trusted a driver I shouldn’t have, but that life I guess.

when other people hurt you, mislead you, betray you,
it is still, nevertheless, your responsibility to heal yourself,
and that is a hard truth to take.

it's weird you know,
to be in the same physical world as everyone else,
but still be entirely sure that you are worlds apart.

Life has a way of leaving us with little nicks.
Points of impact left on a windshield from kicked up stones;
Strong enough to withstand the unexpected assault,
But lacking the resilience to hold its composure after years of these microscopic erosions.
And like too much pressure on a wine glass, you shatter.
The defense you had is in pieces;
You become jagged where you used to be soft.
And I understand that no one wants to carry broken shards of glass in their hands.

it's strange how the harshest words will always ring as clearly as church bells inside your head,
but the kind words fall and fade away as quickly as they're spoken into existence

a passing rain cloud

the condition where you are a shattered wine glass,
reflecting the light from the sunset and painting rainbows across the skin of everyone you love,
but jagged and drawing blood when held too tightly.

Don't be so ******* yourself, don't punish yourself for things that are not your fault, don't give endlessly to people that will never give anything in return, don't strive for the unattainable illusion of happiness as being something that is earned. Don't believe that you are defined by what has happened to you, and don't believe that quiet but incessant voice trying to convince you that your own meticulously planned self destruction will be worth it.

The slow drip of self doubt will wear you down little by little, until one day everything inside of you will snap. You do not want to spend six months of your life under fluorescent lights, watching people that reflect back at you the vacancy you see in your own eyes. You don't want to be left with bits of a shattered life, trying to piece yourself back together; but that is where these things will lead you. You cannot outrun or outsmart the cruelties of the world. You cannot treat yourself with contempt and come out unscathed. You are not invincible.

the kind of girl that doesn't say what she means because puzzles have always fascinated her; how the most unlikely pieces fit together.

the kind of girl that flinches at the slightest touch but wears her scars like a suit of armor.

the kind of girl that desires closeness while making absolutely certain to keep you at arms length.

The kind of girl that wonders if maybe we are all just differing degrees of paradoxes and maybe, just maybe, there is something beautiful in her complexities.

it's a shame that beautiful words aren't enough to hold together the broken pieces and jagged edges that live a hidden existence inside all of us.

the condition where you scratch at your skin like you're trying to dig up secrets;

as if the winding trails of red painted by your finger tips will tell you why you weren't good enough.

the sound of your name feels like taking a bullet.

Will I ever be able to get far enough away to feel safe?
What I had failed to realize is that distance can never bring you peace of mind.

If you live your life feeling as though you're a victim of circumstance, you will always be stuck in a rut of helplessness. Awful things happen in life, things you could have never prepared yourself for, and its unfair but that's just the name of the game. You won't always have control over what happens to you, in fact, most of the time you will be life's chess piece; but what you do have control over is the way you react to grief and adversity and bumps in the road. You have the freedom to choose your own mindset in any given set of circumstances. You can choose to play the hell out of the hand you've been dealt. I promise that you can survive a lot more than you think you can so don't give up, you just may surprise yourself. And besides, if you're not moving forward, where are you going?

I know that some wounds injure you so deeply that they require stitches to repair.

yet here I am, hell bent on fixing lacerations with band-aids.

Ed became my voice when mine grew too quiet.
After years of being told I was a difficult child,
I silently committed to my own disappearance.
I became negative space as Ed became my only identity.
No one has a voice when no one is listening,
and that is why I let the demons in my head speak for me.

I know that you don't believe everything must have significant meaning.

I know you don't see the whole world as art.

I know these things, and this is why you will never understand the condition of my heart.

the heart condition where you can't remember what it's like to feel yours beating

The subjects you wouldn't dare touch with the lights on

sometimes I lie very still; afraid to move for fear of the very fragile parts inside of me shattering into too many pieces to put back together this time.

There are two types of sadness,
there is the overwhelming kind;
it hits you in waves,
hard enough to make you forget how to breathe.
And then there is the other kind,
a sadness that is buried too deep inside of you to ever quite grab on to,
a constant aching reminder that you are one too-sympathetic-look away from coming apart entirely at the seams.
It is a quiet kind of sad,
the kind that is dull enough for you to grow accustom to, but painful enough to make you wish to never see 3 a.m.
And I still cannot decide which is worse.