i think this is happening because it's so dark out, and the only time you can really see yourself is when the lights are off. tonight i am a piano stumbling down the stairs, i am chapped lips pooling with summer sweat, that one thing you were always afraid to say, the fear of waking up from a nightmare and having it be reality. i am dante, circling the inferno but i'll never learn. i am that humbling ache when you realize that you're done being proud of yourself, because there's always bigger mountains and more notches to put in your bedpost. i try to count scars like the rings of a tree and i realize that souls have no age. i always wonder if it's still considered loneliness if you choose it, if it counts as being alone if you're afraid of other people. i still want to know if ignorance is bliss, or if bliss is telling yourself you're right, even though you know deep, deep down, it's not true.

i think if you cut me open i’d bleed letters, my heart beats similes and my breathing is a hyperbole. my elbows don’t quite fit anywhere, and i don’t know why that is important, but it is. i wear my heart on my sleeve almost too literally, but i always end up wearing the same outfit. that pitter-patter you keep hearing is probably just my mind running to the christmas morning that is the way your hand holds a coffee mug and how you squint your eyes when you’re really listening. if you snapped the strings of a violin, one by one, that is how i feel right now. i don’t know how not to be confused, and i also don’t know how to be comfortable. when everything should be at rest i’d rather run, and i’d prefer to snuggle up into chaos and uncertainty.

do you remember that time i had a stomachache and you stayed up all night with me, drawing pictures on a pizza box? or the time tried we to skip rocks and mine would always just sink, sink, sink to the bottom and oh, how retrospectively that irony is killing me. i’d count my summer freckles and we’d try to count your always freckles but it was endless just like the dysphoria catching myself right before i fall. always, me. i’m sorry that i always use the wrong words, and i am sorry that i can’t always pull myself up by my bootstraps. and i’m even sorrier that i can only stutter paradoxes at the most cardinal of moments. instead of lub-dubbing my heart is singing that bittersweet symphony out of tune and it seems a little silly that it all happens like this. and it seems even sillier that i rub these things onto my skin like you’d rub the engraving of a tombstone, to remember that they disappeared but they’ll always haunt you.

give me your darkness and i’ll origami it into a thousand paper cranes. come to me on your blue days and i’ll paint you periwinkle, cerulean, indigo and sapphire. when those words just won’t come off your skin i’ll give you soap and won’t watch. i can’t teach you how to be honest but i can teach you how to become sunday mornings and undercooked brownies, butterfly kisses, unmet expectations and summer thunderstorms. i’ll forget how to be gracious and soon i’ll forget how to be kind, because everyone is just a reincarnation of what we hate about ourselves or what we wish we could be. if i wanted this to be easy, i would have given in already. but now i’m putting up a fight and i’m not sure why, but i have my fists in front of my face and i’m going to meet my demons outside by the dumpster and give those ******* cowards what they deserve.