HELLO MOTHER
HELLO FATHER
SORRY IM THE
DIFFICULT DAUGHTER
CANT WAIT TO SHOW YOU
ALL MY PROGRESS
TO MAKE UP FOR 23 YEARS
OF DISAPPOINTMENT

How did I manage
to be my own captive
on a capsized ship
I set sail on as captain
Now i’m the spit of the sea
on the shore of an island
when the ocean tasted me
she got violent

A year is a long time to carry the weight of your name

but i’ve brought it as far as we’ve drifted away

Along with souvenirs of sentiment we shared before the shipwreck

I kept all the things you left to sink and they make me ******* seasick

An ocean apart now, a few times I near drowned

trying to swallow old memories I should have just spit out.

They burned like water in my lungs and turned to sea salt in my mouth

that left a taste that stung my gums and made your name hard to keep down.

A year is a long time to carry the weight of a name that won’t respond

across an ocean between my voice and the person to which it belongs.

I faintly hear the metal frame of a bed grind against springs and screws
The sound of coming loose in the next room, both the bedframe and you
i tried to find solace in the television screen but the only distraction it has to offer me is an uncomfortably relatable message that reads: “lost connection.”
Im drunk again on a friend’s couch, keeping count of consecutive nights I’ve avoided my own house
And my sobriety
Pale ale prayers at four in the morning are the only times you’ll hear me confessing but not to god

just another ceiling

Undress my existence
Expose my bones
Fix my fractures with kisses
I want to be whole.
Fulfill my little wishes
Plant a garden in my skull
Fall asleep beneath my ribcage
Until it feels like home.
In time, you will find
The bend in my spine
Like a crooked stack of books
With my entire life defined.

It's 2023 and I think  everyone's tired of me not participating
in Reality
Get over it
Get on with it
Get through it
It's time to be an adult again
Alyssa, it's time to function.
I didn't choose to do it I woke up like this
Next to painful cognitive dissonance
Im impregnated
with self awareness that I'm stuck like this
I left the name up to my therapist
She calls it Dissociation
Short for Borderline Psychosis

I'm intelligent and keen to the shift
In my brain
I've learned to respond to my name
But I can't control it
At least now I'm aware of the present
and that my presence is not present-tense
Nor is it past-tense
I'm alive and at the same time
I feel non-existent

What philosophy is this?
What psychology is this?
What conspiracy of reality have I disrupted and caused to shift
Explain to me why mentally and physically
I am disconnected

I am just an entity
I am a reduction of my humanity
to the simple piece of machinery
that thinks
I am my thoughts
observing and witnessing
outside of the thing that gives my life meaning
I am not one with my body
I am just aimlessly floating
In a plane of my suffering
So vast and so deep
My body rejected the parasitic entity
that I refer to as "me"
I've been ejected from the thing that gives me an identity
My therapist calls it Dissociating.

Convincing my physical being to accept me
is easier than you think
It's just that my thinking is cloudy
I think too complexly
I just need to eat

You might assume that means
My human needs
that I need protein
but once I eat and I'm full then you'll see
It's my ego that was starving
and the reason for any of my writing
is to feed it the flattery it needs.

It's only a matter of time before Dissociation wakes up from her sleep.