You know it's getting bad when you don't bother to turn the lights on.

Fight or flight instinct in the form of rivers running dry. Feeling blurry, a forgery. The end is always the same, penalties lying in ditches and the sirens running red and blue like the fourth of July.

Shimmering sawdust that forgets how to become human again. Try to remember the moments you stilled into statue. They become important. Trust me.

This is not Jerusalem. There is no holy left. It's a too-human fight, and I hope what they say about time healing things is true because this scraping, this constant rearranging of the keys, it's too much.

When nothing makes it better, not the kisses, or the pills, or the planets. Nothing. The past and present chewing me up and spitting me out, until the future can get its hands on me too.

I am still trying to figure out right and wrong. I am still trying to find out where the bandages are, but it's hard, you know?

She had soft smiles and a degree in empathy framed in her office, but I couldn't stand her for more than a month. I could see her pen twitching in her hand. After all, there are boxes to tick if I get too honest.

I shouldn't have called my mom, or let her fish me out of the river. While I was coughing liquid from my lungs, I heard her tell the paramedic,

*She could have learned to breathe underwater, if only she'd tried harder.