i don't expect you to come back. in fact, i wish i could find a way out of my own skin. i wish i could leave me. i wish i were a stranger, someone i've seen only in passing, feeling secondhand embarrassment watching my own reactions. stumbling, grabbing onto everyone around me out of desperation for some kind of balance. it's the same way when i'm drunk, but only then does this feeling that i'm suffering somehow lift up off of my chest for a while. but what is it that hurts me. what is it that burdens me. aren't i safe now. my mother tells me depression comes from a lack of faith, as does anxiety. i've been in churches my whole life but the hymns haven't stomped out the fire i feel under me. the sense of danger. my mind is always telling me to run like i'm gonna die if i dare try to defy it. mother Mary sits on a rosary but she doesn't say anything. i sit in sanctuaries and i always cry from an overwhelming sense of gratitude that it could get better, but it never really gets better. so i have only hope that if i just keep calling, i'll eventually hear the answer. i dug myself into a hole when i rebuked you for saying i was cold, but the truth is that i really am. i can be such a harsh woman. when i was six, i would pick at my scabs, and i still open old wounds as if the blood is more attractive than the scar. i am always reaching for something beautiful, only to get handfuls of thorns. i'm still hanging roses up on my walls, something dead yet pleasing. and my books are all filled with pressed flowers but i still have no real use for them. i'm always holding onto empty, dead things, but i inherited a stubbornness that wrings them out into nothingness, waiting for the rain to fall from a cloudless sky. there is nothing for me here.
