Someone from the school I haven’t been to in six months asked me how I’d been, where’d I’d been.

And as my head and heart played tango, as a boxing match took place In my stomach, I eventually managed to stutter out a response,

“I’ve been OK”

When all I really wanted to say, to explain was boiling, bubbling, crumbling, something. The thing I use to stitch myself up at night when the world is too much and my brain really feels like ******* me over. On the nights where the thin red lines aren’t enough to quitien the white noise and the demon cries that haunt my head.

You see all I really wanted to say was,

My brain is an echoing hallway drenched in lonely.

It never learned how to be ok.

And I don’t know how to ask.

I miss the anxiety, the warm comfort of it. The predictability in the unpredictable of it. It would show I was just never quite sure when. Anxiety showed up when no one else did. And I miss the faint thunder of my heart how it used to threaten to burst from my chest. I miss the pool of sweat that would collect on my palms painting everything I touched. 

I don’t know how to be ok.

I miss the mania. How it would destroy me from the inside out. Shredding and burning my nerves until I felt like I could finally feel something. Until I felt on fire. I miss becoming Icarus and flying so, so close to the sun. I miss the stars blanketed in an inky french sky as I swam in the pool at three in the morning.

I  just wanted to see the stars before I fell asleep.

I miss the nativity in believing I could starve the lonely right out of me.

I miss the self-loathing. The familiar warm heat of hatred that would settle on my lower belly until I couldn’t breathe. Until I was gasping for air. I miss the feeling of being so utterly consumed by something. Of being devoured by something until I had nothing left to give. 

I miss having nothing left to give.

I miss the dissociation. The blissed out numbness where the whole world was wrapped in cling film. I miss the fog and the low hanging clouds that obscured my vision and blunted my senses. I miss being an extra in my own movie.

I miss haunting myself.

My brain is a clanging corridor haunted by the childhood I did not have and my memories which aren’t my memories.

Memories that buzz around the foot of my bed. Twisting and turning, transporting and transforming into dreams.

My brain is a ripped page from the end of a book.  Tattered and torn, scribbled and scattered. The reader so desperate so disillusioned by reality that they dreamt up a happy ending filled with ghosts and ghouls and half rembeared, smoke-screen people. Of warped laughter and gargled screams.

My brain is a concave of nothing but the smell of sun cream and cigarette smoke.

My brain is taking a bath with its ears underwater. Completely submerged in lukewarm, swirling, sloshing liquid.

And my brain doesn’t know how to be ok.

It’s never learnt how to be anything but a swirling cesspool of anger and doubt and a few flies that got caught along the way.

I miss haunting myself.

This whole not killing myself buisness is ******* exhausting but I’ve been told it gets better. 

Easier. 

Eventually. 

I can’t imagine it ever being easy.

And some days I still miss haunting myself.

But I’m giving being alive a shot, properly alive not just swimming around in a fish bowl, alive. I just need to remember to read the instructions, this time round and save the thirty day warranty.

You never know, it could be handy.

But when you ask me, in the carpark on 36th street, wearing converse, blue skinny jeans and your beats.

The words get stuck in my throat.

So yeah, that’s what I really wanted to say, but I don’t.
                                                                                                                                                
“I’m OK.”

“You?”