there are days when my room turns into an ocean and i, a shipwreck of the person i used to be. i know i'm supposed to save myself — they tell me i'm supposed to clutch onto a lifeline of heartbeats attached to the shore, that i'm supposed to drain these night-tides dry. but my sadness is born from the seafoam and the seafoam — it's everywhere.

it's everywhere.

they tell me i'm supposed to save myself, that i'm supposed to sink my maelstroms on the bleakest of the sea beds. but how do i tell them that i am the maelstrom that needs destroying? how do i tell them that i have become the love child of melancholia and of the ocean after the storm? they tell me i'm supposed to live — i tell myself i'm supposed to live. but today, i'm quite okay with sinking into the depths the ocean floor.

today, i'm quite okay with not saving myself. today, i'm quite okay with drowning.

I used to be that girl who believed in staying close to the things and to the people who make you feel human — make you alive. But these days the book clutters look just like a patch of misplaced stars while the dusk crawled in my head, and the poems look better when they're crumpled or written in red inks and on my wrist, and all the songs just come and go. Today, I let all four of my cacti die. Today, my eyes took the form of the nimbus clouds, and my body reeked of petrichor; maybe it has returned to dust. Today, I felt too empty to even mind the emptiness. And today, I would've written a eulogy to that girl who used to believe that we should all stay close to the things and to the people that make you feel human and alive.

The thing is, sometimes we're not alive anymore.

there's a reason for all the midnight cigarette breaks in the fire escape while hoping my mom won't smell the smoke. there's a reason for every uneven haircut; products of sleeplessness or stagnation or something i no longer understand. there's a reason for the paperbags of dysphoria and cheap bourbons lying untouched beneath my bed, and for the days when my bed felt like home and home meant emptiness and emptiness was preferable to my favorite song or to the scent of the beach. there's a reason for letting go of all the obvious lifelines and deliberately sinking into this disarray of black holes. but you breathe marigolds and sunlight dipped in bottled petrichors

and tonight, i no longer know how to translate my storms into a weather you can understand.

i am a tender wound made of stitches —
bleeding at each
and every bit of touch.

so tell me, how far
and for how long
should I run
to escape from everything
that ever hurt?

how,

when I am everything
that ever hurt?

how do you gaze at the rabbit hole in your chest without falling down into it?

drawn to my sister planet
we tear out our hairs
the fiery sorts of dissent
into the depths of my apathy
climactic orbit in yearning
pushed against your clamour
i long to be obliterated
dispel this feeling of unfeeling
remove me