Be with me when I am merely lines and edges, seeping into myself,
like soap through fingers after being scrubbed raw.
Can I wash my skin so much that it turns to dust and rubble?
Bright pink and raw, water merging with water, salted with emotion, steaming heat.
My mother always reminded me to wash behind my ears,
but a cotton cloth does not have the strength to cleanse mine from what they’ve heard.
Furious lather, scraping bits of skin, thumbs cracked and caked, kisses as bandaids.
Down the drain.
Swirls and rushes, empty tub and words to go down with it.
Wet tile bed, curled around the steamed aluminum, bunched eyes and clenched fists.
A railed curtain shield, droplets of moisture running, clear and red concoction.
Down the drain.
Hot to cold comfort, fingernail paintings, ripped skin and cracked tap.
Drip but not drop, losing but not lost.
Crawl up, out of dangerous waters, hoisting over porcelain obstacles.
Pull the plug from the outside, all fours on linoleum floors.
Down the drain.

An anxious person's life comes with a set of rules, a guidebook on how to survive that is  etched between the neurons of said person's brain.
Each day fits neatly into a schedule, clocked in by the second and placed firmly into a time slot that is fixed and immovable.
Each thought is churned and questioned before finally being spit out.
Each sentence is perfectly manufactured as it has been sent down an assembly line and thoroughly checked before being spoken.
Each situation is analyzed and placed into a pros and cons power struggle before being decided upon.

An anxious person in love is a difficult thing.
Love can't be placed into a box, can't be precise and planned and prepared for.
Love can't be controlled or put into an agenda, can't be narrowed down into a certain time frame or date range.
Love is bigger than any person can hold in their hand. Love can get away, slip through the cracks and get scattered and messy.
An anxious person does not like messy. It makes them anxious.

Before I met you, I was a hurricane of a girl.

I was full of burning hot lava and made up of not just star dust but meteor showers.

I was the moon and the sun and every type of sky in between, the purple and blue of a whirlwind storm and the orange-pink hues of a tired day.

I could create waves as high as the boats that sailed my waters, then calm them just before they sank.

I could put every ******* natural disaster to shame with the power I held inside of my gut and my heart and my soul.

Now, I am the aftermath. I am the battered towns and the sunken dirt.

I am the cloudy night that conceals the evening lights and the defeated sea that seems to submerge into itself under the weight of the sinking sky.

I am composed of the residue of every catastrophe you have thrown my way, but underneath the rubble is the same girl from before, alive and whole and full of every great storm and tsunami tide the world has ever seen.

Start digging.

I am a challenge, your own personal jigsaw puzzle.
You scattered my pieces all over your dinner table, sorting them into rough edges and smooth centers, completing me slowly from the outside in, until one day you decided that your fingers were too worn to continue.
An incomplete project, counting it as a loss, of interest and time and space in your too small, already cluttered world.
A picture that could have been beautiful, a landscape of somewhere you had only dreamed of, but instead discarded as simply a silly distraction, something too childish for your mature mind.
You left me fragmented and dispersed, disorganized when you knew I needed everything to be in one place, together, whole.
You never finish what you start, and I knew that from the beginning. I just hoped I could be the one thing you stuck around long enough to solve.

Some mornings, heartbreak is in your bones, settled deep inside though you can’t seem to recall sending the invitation.
Your rib cage stands like the bare tree of fall, the wind whistling through it’s frail branches, tapping on your window as if to remind you, you are alone.

Some mornings, heartbreak is in your skull, in the crevices of the pale blue casing that surrounds your every thought, the broken dreamcatcher trying to keep the evil away.
But ghosts can float between the bars, slip inside your deepest secrets, with no regret or remorse for making you cry out in the night.

Some mornings, heartbreak is in your spine, intertwining like ivy on a lamp post, leaving you begging for someone else to hold your own head up for you.
Comfort resides in the hours spent cut off from reality, for at least you have control of that, though the dreams leave you franticly reaching in the night for something unknown to even you.

Some mornings, heartbreak finds it’s way back to your heart, slides through the valves, into the ventricles, mixing with the blood that gives you life. Heartbreak gives you life. Heartbreak reaches every last corner of your body, crippling you and taunting you, but you are still capable of breathing on your own. Heartbreak may be a thief, but you are a statue, broken and crumbling around the edges but still standing after all these years.

Some mornings, heart break is in your body. It seems to make up the essence of you, but it is not your being. You are your being.