around me are civilians
struggling with what it means
to be normal.

stuck in a loop of society's
standards and how their parents
raised them.

A plethora of mental chaos
and the burden of growing.

around me is myself
struggling with what it means
to be normal.

lost inside the idea
of being in control of something.

Their normal has a face.
It’s an object, or found at a place.

My normal is void of
human characteristics-
it is all solidified inside
this lost memory that
rips my limbic system
into an endless limbo
of hyper vigilance and manicness
I am a vigilante at best.

My normal is foreign.

My normal is a girl
with a slanted face
sitting in class
wondering why
the tip of her pencil
feels like a vice grip-

why the words
from a professor’s
lips sounds like grooming-
when in reality
she's stuck in a trance.

She's stuck inside the time
she got bribed for intimacy

stuck in a time
where she thought trust
was lust and that little girls
we're supposed to be submissive.

She's hanging by the thread of her thoughts
realizing these are memories-
realizing she cannot stitch up the holes inside of them.

That all this bad ****
isn't actually a daydream
that she can just fidget and blink and pinch
her way out of.

So now she has to learn to cope-
while she has an hour & a half
to take an exam and her mind
is void of any information.

She has never been taught
a lesson that she didn't teach herself.

I have never been taught
a lesson that I wasn’t manipulated
into learning.

So forgive me-
Bc my wish to be normal
is your struggle.

Forgive me
because this trauma
isn't a competition
but I can't help feeling like
I'm losing
can’t help but wish I was
in the place of others.

Can’t help but feel like my childhood
is nothing but an ankle monitor
keeping me distant from myself.

I am carrying around this burdening
that no one has any idea what to do with.

I am drowning in the idea
someone else will ever be able to help me.

I'm drowning in the idea of solitude
and independence-

That loneliness will someday
feel like progress.

That this pencil
will no longer feel like a vice grip.

I am choking on the absence of words
just dead air and radio silence.

This salience,
here on this stage-
will swallow me whole.

The only place I can call home.
This type of normal chains itself to me.