How loud can I get the music?
I hit the volume button a couple more times for good measure.
I’ve spent two years crafting a playlist for moments just like this,
Moments when I have a
Thousand anxiety attacks at once.

1.
I think of more and more reasons
To resent you for leaving me.
I hate that I can’t comfort you.
I hate that you can’t comfort me.
I hate that you left without a second thought.
I hate that I miss you when you treated me like ****.
I hate that thinking of you makes me cry.
by Another Ex-Best Friend.

2.
I live a good life.
I have a lot of things I’ve always wanted,
Made true by a draw of luck that sent my anxiety to the back burner.
I was happy.
I was really happy.
But I’m not happy anymore, and I can’t be sure why.
I no longer want these things,
But people ask them of me and I smile and
Either I’ll go or I’ll make an excuse.
There’s no telling these days.
by The Suffocating Cynicism.

3.
I wrote a poem about telling you
All the things you did to me that apparently you never noticed.
It was 3 AM.
It seemed like a good idea.
Now I look at you, calculating when I’ll get the chance to bring those words to life.
And I swallow them right back into my fractured heart,
Because looking at you terrifies me.
Being near you makes me sick.
This can go one of two ways:
Either you turn your life around in a flurry of realization and apologies,
Or you leave a couple more bruises and some blood and
Maybe a restraining order in your wake.
by Your Latest Conquest.

4.
Somehow you ask so much of me without even realizing it.
You’ve grown.
You’ve changed, just like the rest of us,
But there are still so many things you refuse to change
Because you have sculpted guard rails that block them from your view,
Carefully crafted and immaculately cultivated.
There is no escape.
I wonder why I feel this way, because I should love you, and I do love you,
But sometimes I want to cry because you consume my life
And I cannot escape.
by Your Life’s Work.

5.
There are things that stand between me
And my greatest achievements.
If you notice,
They both have “me” in them.
Did you know I wrote a book?
It has one scene left,
But I can’t finish it because
Nothing feels right and no one knows
What that ending needs, because no one
Knows this world as well as I do, like the back of my hand and a shred of my heart.
I want someone to give me the answer.
I want someone to finish it for me, because endings are important.
Endings are necessary.
They need closure and a reason to return when asked.
I finally stopped keeping my work clutched to my chest,
And thought maybe I would show it the light of day.
No one noticed.
I laughed and tried again, posting it in a couple of places,
Drawing nonexistent attention.
I’ve created obstacles I cannot scale.
by The Woeful Worriers.

6.
Very few people are able to see a person’s pain.
In my experience, it totals to one.
One person can tell when I’m hurting, and she lives 9,000 miles away
In tomorrow where life is sometimes a little bit better.
She’s the only one that gets pictures of my first foray
Into a ****** world I told myself I would never enter.
I told her it looked cool.
She disagreed.
I broke down.
She checked up on me every other day, and it hurt even more.
Eventually I stopped wearing long sleeves,
And stories stopped swirling in my head.
It became apparent that no one cared.
No one was going to ask about the healing scar on my arm.
Do I care? Because honestly, I can’t tell.
I want people to notice,
To know how much I’m suffering and tell me it’s okay
To take a break from all of the things that are drowning me.
But if people notice, they’ll know.
They’ll know that I’m suffering,
That I did this to myself,
And their footsteps will crush the eggshells they walk on.
It’s less genuine than Her. She’s been there. She knows.
I thought one person in particular would notice,
But it makes me laugh in hindsight,
Because she never noticed a single thing I did.
No one notices.
I’ve come to terms with that.
I’ve come to terms with the dark room that my own thoughts lock me in,
That no one else has a key
And it is my own responsibility to find my way out.
It’s like a sick, grotesque Escape Room.
If only I had the motivation to find the clues.
by The Silence.

7.
I’m happy.
Honestly, the last six songs were all it took
to heal me and cure me and take away all of this pain.
I’m smiling,
See?
I feel lighter.
Until this verse ends and the next begins,
Pulling that feathered feeling over my head and suffocating me,
Reminding me that nothing is okay no matter how hard I try to believe it.
I have learned that I am a very good actor.
I lie so often that I started to believe it was the truth.
But the truth doesn’t like to be ignored.
It came back and reminded me that I was never okay.
by Recurrent Denial.

8.
I can’t breathe.
My skin feels oddly cold even though I’m sweating,
And the deep breath I pulled into my lungs
Catches in my throat.
I have two options;
Hold it and suffocate slowly, deliciously, inching into darkness and leaving hell in my wake.
Or, I breathe out the stifled sob it has created and resign myself
To another break down.
Another one.
They never end.
As much as I like the first option, it isn’t very easy to suffocate yourself by holding your breath.
You see, your body has this thing called self-preservation,
Even if your mind doesn’t.
So I choke out a sob and wince at the ache in my throat,
Catching my breath and catapulting towards hyperventilation.
I close my eyes and breathe through my nose.
**** that.
I keep breathing, ignoring the tears on my cheeks, just trying to breathe,
Because apparently the body likes breathing even if it’s a hindrance to its inhabitant.
**** it all.
I curl my hands into fists and open my eyes, breathing deliberately.
I lick my lips and breathe away the tears,
Because I so cannot be bothered with this right now.
It lasts five minutes, and then it’s tucked away
For later.
I was always really great at repressing break downs until
They piled upon each other and exploded in a gut-wrenching fit
Of tears and swollen fists and maybe a tiny bit of screaming.
That’s how I broke my piano bench.
by Another Fractured Name.