My mistakes go retro, I’ve made them before
sometimes I think being forced to talk through lightbulbs would maybe stop it all
all the awkward hello-I-exist moments all the overreactions all the irritated snaps when I can’t snap out of it all the times I didn’t mean to cry out *******,
no, with that limitation I’d only say what I needed to

It’s not like I’m living upside down but it sure does feel like it
hidden away in my head so much that the outside world feels eerie
daylight is bright white and reality is my Demogorgon
I’m too tired to fight it, and standing in supermarkets, bleary-eyed
feels unreal, like a fake body in a quarry
I just wish love was enough to overcome worry

My dungeons are four cream walls closing in on me, infecting me with black slime that weighs me down too much to move
My dragons are adrenaline and exhaustion, they take turns attacking me,
these demons keep trapping me, and I keep getting told it’s too soon
It’s too soon for this, I’m just a kid
lost in the forest, upside down and off-grid
I’m off-kilter, with a faulty brain-filter and my squirming blue fingers
are gripping bike handles and trying to rebuild her

The ******* the wire, the girl with inner fire whose eyes shined like the lights I wish I had to communicate with
that girl would have slain the Demogorgon with idealism and defiance,
now I wish it away in the pretense that it’s a myth
She could whisk objects away into a magical space, a deep forest of brave faces,
seeing beauty in all things through summer dazed rays of romance
skipping along rivers, hair fair and careless, daring to dream of daisies gleaming, just on the lookout for the next rhyme,
unaware that this was the strongest she’d ever be, the least cowardly, unaware that she’d one day be me.

Locked up in the four walls with no fairy lights or lyrics,
Joyce Byers without a reason,
crazy with no spirit.
Months on end immersed in dungeons, fighting dragons,
only to escape and be faced with this deadly Demogorgon:
life without eleven lenses of hope. A life cynical and devoid of magic,
less nightmarish than the upside down but just as bleak,
this is the monster that makes me weak

it’s not the upside down, but my own reality.

I’m still waiting for my sling-shot, sleeping until my powers are restored,
there’s nothing worse than seeing the world and being bored,
in eleven days I’ll try again,
I have at least eleven days of hope left,
I’ll get out of this swimming pool, hop over the barbed wire,
eleven days to find that girl again and turn my gasoline fire inwards,
to escape the wasteland once and for all,
for the world to be big enough that I don’t hear the Demogorgon through the walls,

Eleven days to fix my sanctuary in the forest,
so I can light up both my outward-looking eyes like the aurora borealis.