Please don't tell me it ends like this. Please don't tell me this is how I go. Every morning I force optimism into my veins- like medicine; like ******. I let it drip drip under my skin, the fluid moving like it would through the twists and turns and chilly burns of a plastic IV. I stayed in a hospital for ten days. My bed had plastic sheets and my roommate had panic attacks in her sleep. They always asked me how I felt. How do I feel? How do I feel? I feel nothing at all Or, I feel everything, and like paints bleeding into one another, the colors lose their definition, and the light fades into nothing, and my mind is made a murky place. I can't believe that everything happens for a reason. My heart doesn't beat that way. When I **** my head I can hear the rush of my blood. Why did my uncle bury his own heart? Why did he build castles just to leave? I can't make sense of this- I won't let myself. They say Icarus died because of his pride, but maybe he knew that we all **** ourselves in the end. Maybe he found a way to the light. Is hopelessness a sin? If hell is punishment then what is this? When I drink I feel closer to God. I feel like I can float through the cracks in my walls and join the angels. But my father drank himself through twenty years and his joints gathered rust. There is a kind of beauty in the darkness. Maybe that's where our momentum is meant to take us. Maybe death is like a static screen. Can we move through it? Around it? Within it? In school they told us that matter cannot be destroyed. How is it then that we destroy ourselves so wonderfully? I don't know what I was before this. Tabula rasa. Someone painted 'DISASTER' inside my head. I don't remember having steady hands. I wonder if I could feel an earthquake. Isn't it funny how this world loves to hurt? I admit, pain is a captivating thing. Our bodies were made to be resilient, our minds elastic, but our souls? They are spun like spiderwebs, or glass, or fairy floss in grubby little hands. We were made to fall apart. Our lungs were meant to burn. I stopped picking at my scabs when I was ten years old, but my finger tips still itch, and I still have the scar from when I fell on a piece of broken glass. I used to make jokes about it- say I got it from trying to **** myself, but now I have scars from that too. Something still pulls inside of me when I smile, but it feels a little easier, like walking on a mending bone. Maybe one day the rain will be the only thing to make my teeth creak. A lot of the time I still feel smothered, like wallpaper painted over. Maybe all I'll ever be is a forgotten ship, sinking, sinking, sunk, but at least I'll still be something. And I'll still be made of the same stuff as stars, and maybe that will be enough.