Trapped
Under the beaten up tiles
of this house
that once used to be so familiar
Now all of the windows have shut
and all the doors have locked
and I stand in the immense
suffocation
of these painful memories
and regret from the choices I once made
and I wonder if one day
the blinds will open
and beaming sunlight will be released
into this home,
but I've been in darkness for far too long
that there is little hope and much hatred
towards this house I used to know so well
Now tell me, how does one keep hope towards something they've been waiting an eternity for?

I swear looking in your eyes gives me a surreal power to see into the future because when we are face to face I can see us twenty years later curled up in scruffy blankets on a queen sized bed laughing about what we did when we were kids and I swear that the raspy way you say my name makes me envision you fifteen years from now calling me the exact same way from our kitchen

but on some days when I look into those chocolate brown eyes I see you thirty years from now kissing her cheek and whispering soft compliments in her ears

and on some days, our eyes don't meet at all, because they're secured like a padlock in hers, painfully reminding me

of what will never
ever
be

WHY DID I EVER THINK YOU COULD BE MINE WHEN WE ARE LIKE THE OCEAN AND THE SHORE, CONSTANTLY CRASHING ON EACHOTHER BUT NEVER HARMONIOUSLY FLOWING THROUGH THE SAME WAVES AND WHY DID I LET YOU LET ME FEEL SPECIAL WHEN I KNEW YOU WOULD SLASH MY HEART AND CHAR MY INSIDES WITH YOUR SWEET LIES AND SOFT HELLOS THAT WOULD EVENTUALLY LEAD ME TO MY DEATH

does life ever feel so desperate that you find yourself relentlessly convincing yourself that you're made of something the world needs, that the sun burns in attempt to let you shine, that oxygen flows in molecules through the air just to keep you breathing
but the convincing is so inauthentic that you can feel the hours passing by and the skin peeling off your cold body in an effort to escape the inner self-destruction going on
  my organs are afraid and my stomach turns, my eyes droop, my lungs deflate, my heart falls to the ground and shatters
    everything around me is trying so desperately hard to remind me of how much i don't matter, and how easily my life can be simply taken away
            you win
               because now
                    nothing matters
                        and in soon enough time,
             my heart wont have to pulse in fear
my lungs won't have to heave
    and my eyes won't have to swing down so low
because i won't matter either.

i see you, and suddenly i remember how to sleep
how to inhale, exhale, then shut my eyes so the world can again fall to subtle ease
i wish to lay on your pillowy, pink lips
your arms, my blanket
you sing to me your words that flow melodically
my heart remembers this lullaby,
my lips flush red, you kiss them as if you have't slept in a million years, and i am comfort
i remember to open my eyes
there you are
please don't fall asleep

I guess it hurts the most to know
as the days pass faster
and the minutes stroll by,
our paths are spreading farther and
farther apart
and limb by limb we tear
remembering nothing but the times when we laughed,
and cried together
And now our paths are separate
and lead in two parallel directions
into a life of different experiences
we now have become what we were in the beginning,
strangers
I guess it hurts the most to know,
I wasn't anything worth holding on to.

the state of mind you trapped me in when you locked me inside my own body, confining me to perceive the natural motions of life as if I’m falling from a twenty-story building and perpetually climbing back up the stairs

I have fallen on this same pavement so many times before that I can mutter every name of its  frequent passerby’s, i can mentally trace every skid-mark, every link to your DNA from your musky scent to your bristled hair follicles

How you’ve managed to follow me everywhere I go though I haven’t laid eyes on you in two years,
how those around me sigh with hopeless exhaust when they countlessly attempt to rescue me from another inevitable fall onto the cold concrete,
How you breathe fresh air that holds your feet up from the ground, saving you the trouble of having to empathize with Mother Earth’s raw flesh beneath  you

Yet, I am still heaving through corrupted lungs, still swelling the epithelial tissue lining my throat,
still expectorating old memories just to swallow them again and again, each time forcing me to upchuck ****** acid from a place inside of me that implies no medical explanation

I have become so sick and fractured that i can no longer see,
I cannot hear, I cannot speak
But somehow when I touch, all of my delusional senses return as a shadowy figure that resembles the monster of whom I fear most

My vision funnels in, and out
until I feel nothing but the same cold pavement cushioning my bones like a disjunct lullaby

And as my mind melts into a dissociative puddle of nothingness,
I plant my feet on Mother Earth’s raw flesh, and her magnetic waves of energy wrap around my nimble toes, bringing me back to the staircase upward

im looking for you
searching for you in his eyes, in the water, in my favourite books, in the customers who come into work, in the bubble sheets of my tests, in the windows of cars passing by, in the grass, in the sky
looking for you on my fingertips, in the strands of my hair, in between my toes, in the cracks of my smile
i seem to see you everywhere i look
in everything
in everyone
but you've been gone for months
and my mind can't stop placing you in every aspect of my life
my mind can't forget how completely enthralled the adventure of our relationship had me
i want to see you
and i do see you
but when will you really be there?

i held your hand, felt the indentations in your skin, traced along veins and thumbed the bristled hairs on your forearms
i never noticed how soft your skin was by nature,
how you exist numb to the universe around you,
hairs aligning conveniently to guard your irreparable tissue,
eyes hollowing toward your skull, sinking in deeper with every interrupted breath

b r e a t h i    n      g
you let the air escape your lungs as our hands grasp hold of each other
inhale, exhale,
r e l e    a      s          e
as your hand embraces gravity and lies lifeless and cold,
i was the only one holding us together
how long have you been gone?

it's not my fault
i had to let go
i had to let go
i had to
i had to
i had to

I am always told
the present is a gift
yet I always see people planning ahead
so anxiously waiting for something exciting to happen
People spend so much time
waiting for the future
they forget to live
for right now
and I'm just wondering if they were ever given
the same advice I was

You are a rose that I have admired the beauty of since the first time I saw you except now your petals are almost gone as you've self-destructed the majority of them and your stem seems to be broken and bent, you no longer are rooted in the ground but are wilting over as if your life has fallen down with you and I don't understand it because when I see you you're the most beautiful thing I think I have ever seen but you refuse to see the same as I do, and now you're looking as if your final days are being counted and I don't know if watering you can help anymore. I am afraid this is the end but I can not lose my alluring little flower because I have become the soil, and I need you in order to function

i kissed the reflection of my own lips upon glass, and placed my hand gracefully in my hair, grooming and relaxing my restless, scathed body
i grabbed a lock of hair from the mid-section, watching the hundreds of stragglers begin and end their hopeless journey towards the tiled floor, and collected the strands between my fingers to place them in their designated abyss of uselessness

i looked back into the mirror, acknowledging my own image

today, i said

i pulled my heart off the hanger in my closet, grabbed my lungs from the shelf, and retaught my body the process of living

living, i said, you're still living, whether you like it, or not

my eyes became distracted, inverted, and regressing to a time when i couldn't look pain right in the face, and pain couldn't bare to look at me either.
my lips go cold, void of the warmth provided to them by copious amounts of unconditional self-love. my lips curl, my heart palpitates.

i always used to wonder how someone could swear they loved a person so much that it could **** them, and how it could be possible for a feeling so strong, and so real, to abruptly reach extinction, as if it never even existed in the first place
but as i finally had the strength to look pain in the face,
and pain gathered enough might to do so too,
i realized she's the one i kissed today
in fact,
she's the one i've been kissing and inviting in to recieve my love
everyday

why don't i believe it
why don't i understand
when you tell me how much i mean to you
it just doesn't make sense

how can someone love me
most importantly, how can someone like you love me

all my life i'd believed no one ever could
so when you tell me that you do,
my head spins like a tornado
i just don't believe it
and i still don't believe someone as beautiful as you
could ever love someone as inferior as me.

But the truth is all of my existing energy and all of my motivation has vanished and although i would love to be happy again the harder i try the harder i fall and break and the weights on my shoulder are just too heavy and the worry drains the color in my eyes
i don't believe i can ever become the happy girl that i was
once upon a time

auras swirling, igniting like a chemical reaction
our bodies fill the entire room, yet they stand so far apart
our eyes lock, and there is nothing but the potent sense of remembrance
I almost see myself behind the coppery hues

feeling your skin against mine reminds me of flowing water, sending waves over each other’s  inner essence
I long to get closer, to know if it was ever really me that I saw behind your eyes
or if you’ve been choosing to keep your distance because of the way mine stare back at you

I live in perpetual circumstances of fear, guided by the palpitation in my heart and the heaviness of my breath
It’s as if the whole world exists around me and within me, as if I am separate and yet anxiously connected
I wish I could call it beautiful

there is so much beauty in the world, yet I hold hands with the ugly
I am held by the tentative and cradled by the impermanent
my mind is a filing cabinet of negative possibilities and tragic happenings,
tucked away in the abyss

there is so much to see and yet my sight is clouded
so much to learn and yet my judgment is tainted
it’s like I am walking with fractures, and no one can see the casts wrapped around my ankles

all I want is to feel like my limbs are healing themselves, my heart is relearning how to pulse love through my veins, and my lungs are slowly expelling the toxins that have been making it so hard to breathe

but all I feel is my body rejecting health,
choosing to remain uncured
the pain magnifies, my senses weaken
and all that keeps me connected with those around me
is a force that presents myself to the world in such a way that the bruises painted on my skin
appear as a testament to the  journey I went through to smile again when indeed I am still being beaten

on an ordinary day,
i would gaze into the mirror and watch sunlight radiate from my skin's inner essence
all the little ridges and curves kissing my spine seemed to have transcended from the stars themselves
and every scar seemed to display my life’s most earth-shattering moments,
moments so powerful that they broke through the rooted filaments of my flesh
i remembered what i have been through and have an overwhelming sense of my own inherent magic.
  
every day i've ever had that was like this one, you’d see me holding my head up high, with my shoulders ***** and my lungs full of the purest laughter
you'd think of me as the walking embodiment of strength..

and I loved those days, to my core.

but today,

i seem to be looking at a mangled body
bludgeoned by passersby that manipulated their way past the sunlight and the stardust
i see strangers kicking through the door to my infinite touch

and I fear that the sun-kissed glow of strength that my skin habitually lathers itself in, just masks the battered body of a woman whom wishes that she were strong enough to let her scars heal before letting someone else trace over them with blades

there is so much shame in my entanglement with you. there is shame in how quickly my ears perk up at your lukewarm remarks. shame in the way i incessantly trace back steps i took to heal myself from your initial scrutiny. shame in the way i bleed for you, whilst you pretend not to notice.
my mind is scattered with hundreds of differing perspectives, flooding my thoughts with plans of escaping you, while still keeping my pride. I refuse to acknowledge how i give you the softness that i need to be giving myself. i think i do this all because you aren't available to receive love from another human being. my ego likes to think your indifference is an attack at my self-worth, but I've seen my mangled toes, and i know the injuries are a direct result of walking down my own unique path of self-sabotage. the pain i seek from you  validates the self-hate i hold in my heart. i want to think that your presence in my life is a wake up call, making it abundantly clear the mileage of self-love i need to run before i can ever accept what i deserve. and i deserve way better than you, i know that. i really do. but at the same time, waiting for you to put in the work towards being what i deserve, is something i feel i could wait for forever.