Stagnant, though I've made all this progress.
Recently thinking makes it hurt more,
but for a moment today
I really put the pieces together.

This painful youth, there was a fire raging inside
and it hurt and it made my heart race.
Today I tried to pick up where I left off

and

and?

and I watched it crumble in my hands?

Confused, I took a hard look, and that fire had gone out.
Disbelief.
His name still rings in my mind infrequently, all on its own.
Those sweet memories still in striking detail, I reach for them.
A moment of reunion, a moment.
And you feel stupid for never realizing you'd miss that time,

that you.

And, you know, I've never been closer to all that I've worked for.
And I couldn't care less, I've never felt more empty.
I'm so alone and it'll be a long long time before I ever feel something like that again. If I ever do.
I didn't need to love him to feel that kind of shame.
Every investment I made in my new freedom this summer made me creep back inside myself, slowly, until drinking and dressing up became a new trauma.

The fire was something to live for,
now I just feel like a rectangle.