Ever have one of those nights where you listen to Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt on repeat while you drive your car into the city and proceed to climb the steps of a parking garage while you try to get your ex girlfriend to answer her phone and when she doesn't you stop sit on the third story railing look down and think maybe if I fell I wouldn't quite die but then she'd have to acknowledge that I still exist.
Ever have one of those nights where you're hanging out on a roof with your friends and you're standing on the edge and you really want to jump but instead you step back and freestyle the bars "**** love it ain't a beautiful thing/ it was created by the Devil and all his demons/ and everything's swell til its ******* ending/ then you're slicing through your left wrist's ******* tendons."
Ever have one of those nights where you're in the driver's side back seat and your best friends are filling up the rest of the upholstery and you're having a good time playing "have you evers" and "would you rathers" and **** get's real serious when you friend turns around and says "Jon, do you cut yourself?" and you just feel the tears run down your face a nod you head and they all tell you they love you and they're always there for you and you know that and you've known that.
Ever have one of those nights where you put on one sneaker just so you can stomp on an old disposable razor spend thirty minutes picking off all the plastic pieces and then carve a train track down your forearm in hopes that all your sadness will climb on board a locomotive travel out your veins down your finger tips and crash land on your bathroom floor.
Ever have one of those days where you’re ten years old and no one’s home besides you and your two sisters and you end up getting in a fight over something you can’t quite remember but you end up in your bedroom crying and decide it’s a good idea to take a belt and wrap it around your throat climb onto your dresser and jam the buckle into the slot at the top of your closet door.
Ever have one of those days where you jump Where your body swings like a pendulum Where your toes claw at the side of your bureau Where your sister holds your dead weight until your feet can find a flat familiar surface and you can breathe again
Sometimes I look at myself and think why have my scars healed so seamlessly as if there were never wires strung through my wrists like a marionette manipulated by the hands of hopelessness maybe the last time I drove a razor blade into my forearm the puppeteer made a mistake and severed the strings he had laced deep inside my tendons.
I once filled a bathroom sink with my sadness and walked away I still don’t understand why if Earth is 70% water God allows so many people to be walking aquariums why he gave them leaky faucets and hands that could turn them like a door ****.
Do you ever have one of those days where you feel like there are not enough “do not disturb" signs in the universe and you've had this growing curiosity your whole life about who is knocking on the other side.
I slammed with this the other night. Third stanza I started to cry. By far the hardest thing I've ever written/performed but I'm proud of it and I'm proud of myself.