Thank you.
For making me feel like I have no power.
For taking away my voice, my ability to form thoughts, my ability to sort out how I feel.

My ability to feel.

Thank you, for making me a stranger even to those closest to me.
Unable to reach out, to ask for help, unable to accept kindness or love.

Thank you for making me a prisoner in my own body.
For making it hard to look in the mirror. Making me live in my head, as a being completely separate from my limbs, my stretch marks, the little white rolls of my stomach.

Thank you.

Thank you for allowing me to feel my heart in my throat. For letting the ***** rise up in my throat, so I can let it out. It’s the only thing I can let out that gives me some kind of release.

Thank you for destroying my faith in a god, in others, and in myself.

Thank you for making me question.

Was it my fault?
Does God have pity on sinners who get hurt?
Was there something I could have done?

Thank you for breaking me.

Thank you for killing me before anything else could.

One moment, you're on the top of your own little world
You can see the people that you love,
They are like ants under your feet

But as you're soaring to the sun,
The wings beneath you seem to melt
Wave after wave of burning wax
Cover you until you drown.

And just like that, I find myself underwater
Unable to breach for air
I find my will to care
Slip away

I just want to sleep all day

I don't want to think
Don't want to stop and create

I want to sleep all day

Everything I took for granted
Seems to fall to pieces
The higher I try to climb.

Friends I love are floating away,
Pulled in four directions-
But none of them are going my way.

It's hard to trust myself these days,
How could I lay my foundation on ground when I don't
know if that ground will be right here tomorrow?

I open my laptop I sigh,
I open my bank account, I cry
I open my eyes in the morning and wonder:

Wouldn't it be better to let it all go?

Wouldn't it be better not to know the things that I
Won't ever know?

Don't want to try, cause if I don't try I won't fail,
Won't feel pain if I don't care.

I don't want to care.
I don't want to wake up and check to see if you'll be there

When I don't even know if I'll be there.

So, next week, I lose a limb.
I have it marked on my calendar in neat, purple letters.
Humans, unlike starfish, spiders, or Dr. Curt Connors, cannot regrow limbs.
They can be amputated or removed surgically to prevent disease,
But this is different.

You see, this Friday, when I lose my limb, I won't get a replacement limb.
And the disease, if you can call it a disease, well,
As far as I can see, it'll spread faster than ever.

Have you ever loved someone so much that they become a part of you?

First of all, it's very unhealthy.

Second of all, it's the most wonderful feeling in the world.

Well, if you've ever felt this way toward someone else, it's safe to say that someday, you will start to think of them as an actual part of you- like your other half.

The more time you spend with them, the more you'll read their expressions, pick up on the nuances of their speech and expression, the more you'll open up to them and sync up to their moods and habits-

It's frightfully parasitic.

And when they leave, it's like losing a part of yourself-
After all, you've put so much into each other,
So much that you'll never get back.

I'm in love, and it's beautiful and terrifying.

My love is a part of me that's getting ripped off this Friday.

You see, he's moving three hours away.

He's a year older, and he's going to college.
I'm more scared than he is about it.

Luckily, we're only separated by physical distance.
But honestly- you know that gag in movies where the villains tie the protagonist limb by limb to four horses and send the horses galloping off in four different directions?

That.
It feels like that.

This Friday, I'm losing a limb- for now,
I'm losing him.

So, soon, I'll have to learn to live as just one part of a whole.

That is, until Thanksgiving break...

I can't help feeling when I look at your screen
That our story should be rewritten, ain't all that we seem
I'm sitting at dinner eating all the lies that you dish out
Tell me I'm a fighter but I'm on the bench, sitting out
This ain't my writing, my screenplay was written for me
Acting like a drama queen, motion picture category
Didn't need your ******* but here I am, serve me
This ain't ******* tennis, there ain't no love in you from what I see
Loving in the dark like a parked car, cliché
Forced like a *** joke made in the third grade
Wish I could go back when I didn't know what ***** are
Push it real good, ***** ******* is a fine art
Ask to see my body like my personality’s a waste
****, got the audacity to claim that he’s a ******* ace
Flush me out, yeah no way I’m losing with a full deck
Confiscate my heart to keep the cards I’m playing in check
Heart is pounding out my chest I tell you that I feel sick
You’ve got the audacity to tell me that I’m full of ****
Ask you what you’re playing at you say don’t worry bout it
Friends say that you’re ******* me and man, I don’t ******* doubt it
Been down this road too many times, a year ago
You wouldn’t even talk to me yet here we are, and I’m your **?
***** that’s a joke, man why so serious?
Gassing up this mother, light it up
Fast and Furious

There's something uneasy and unwritten in the texts you send
The subtext feels like the taste in your mouth when you go to bed
Next to someone that you said you love in your head
Wake up in reality to be sleeping next to someone you might
Call just a friend-
But the *** talk laughs at you
In all your stupid fun you
Been together much stranger
Still can't call her number one
Yeah she's just another *****, press send, turn your phone off
Nothing like these feelings to bother you when you're getting off
High like the helium
Ceiling can't hold you down
Standing on a mountain of broken hearts that you said you found
Leaving an ominous trail of notches behind you
Got your big-*** ego dripping in your eyes to blind you
Not like she needed to repeat it when she found you
Broken like a record from the scratches you collected all around you
Held you up until you felt that she belonged banged up, too
When she leaned in for a kiss, her lips met the closed door
Did it make you feel the buzz to take her like a cheap score
Sitting on the edge of her bed with her stomach turning
Thought you were a "something more" but ****, boy, now she's learning
Telling herself she wouldn't rather be dead
From all the wheels turning rotten in the sour of her head
Like the breath in her ear telling her that she can do this
Pounding on the bedsprings is her mantra, she's a Buddhist
Taking all your ******* like a cigarette drag
All of those years and you're still convinced that
She's still kicking it to be close to the one thing you'll never let her have?
Yeah you're a *****- but she loves you, and she's got it bad.

Compared to the universe full of stardust,
How small the spark is that lights a fire?
That keeps me up at night, that keeps us
Alive,
Keeps us burning bright.
Kindling for a kinship, a friendship, a bond more
Infinitesimal than we are
Little ants,
More chemical, more toxic in smaller doses,
More blazingly erratic,
More universal than the stardust
That is us.

I had thanksgiving with my St. Lucian family, my
loud, unapologetic,
laughs-too-loud, generation-gap
homemade ***, heads in phones,
blasting dancehall music
old ladies dancing
clap-back
talk-back
family.
"Play us a song",
my cousin and I sent to my room to play jazz chords, I
finger along clumsily. He's in college and his dark eyes close, fingers
sliding up and down the frets,
frowning in concentration, cursing quietly at a missed note.
My islander family comes over and prompts impromptu drinking games,
"I'm not looking, I saw nothing",
I lick a bit of vanilla ***** from my mother's shot glass,
alcohol becomes a family affair, it
takes away the danger and the stigma and throws a friendly, lovely
light on a vice.
It's raining, it's cold,
islanders do not belong on a Kansas porch smoking cigarettes in the dark rain.
I light candles on the wall.
They all outlast their welcome, between four and a half hours of transition
from uncomfortable "i don't remember your name", put on the spot,
only-child-becomes-one-of-several to
discussing baby names and family gossip, they
all wrap up their food slaved over at nine am, they
all troop out the door, they
take their coats, they
leave their wide smiles with us until next time.