everyone feels alone
sometimes.
we all have parties we couldn't go to,
weren't invited to,
left early because we felt like we didn't belong.
Loneliness is not a disease.
It is human experience,
like love and hunger and getting your toe
stubbed on a door.
What they didn't tell me was that
loneliness should not be a lifestyle.
I don't mean isolation -
I knew not to cut myself off,
I knew we could never survive all alone but
I didn't know that we could never survive
all tangled up together either.
Loneliness becomes a lifestyle when
codependency becomes your idea
of closeness, of love, of identity -
I don't know how long I've thought
other people needed to be helped before me
other people needed to be loved before me
other people needed to be felt before me
I don't know how long I haven't known
Myself to be anything other than others I've loved.

It is so easy to hate yourself when you aren't convinced you exist.

When you're not sure you really aren't just his legs or her torso, their throats combined into one,
Who's to say these hands are really mine?
When I think about my fingers,
individual, small, difficult,
I am scared.
I forget every day that I am here
As soon as I fall into someone else's eyes and shape and words and -
and I do not know how to remember.
My loneliness is not a disease,
tearing me down and eating me from the inside out;
it's the cure that makes me
shiver on a floor of my own sick tendencies
to push and pull and scrape,
never sit,
always wanting more skin
than anyone has to give.