Sometimes I think about the last time I saw you alive and almost told you I loved you. But when I almost said it and you looked at me and said "what is it, babe?" I lost my nerve and squeezed your hand tighter and said "you have beautiful eyes." Instead, and I just stared at you and hoped to convey what I couldn't say. But real life is not a romance novel, "you have beautiful eyes" was not heard as the "I love you" that it was, and even if you had heard it, I guess it wasn't enough, because you killed yourself anyways.

I think my disgust for the human race started in the 5th grade. My best friend and I were not popular girls, but girls bullied by everyone. Eventually it took a toll on my fragile friend, combined with her parents divorce and already being rather sensitive, and she tried to take her own life. Her mother found her hanging and got her down in time to be taken to a hospital and saved. She came back to school months later, a lot quieter and sadder than before. She began to cut. And eventually, someway or another, the other kids noticed. Noticed the cuts, discovered she had tried to take her life. And they targeted her more and more for it, bullying and harassing her nonstop. Making her wish she hadn't survived even more, until eventually she tried to **** herself once again. But she was caught in the act this time, closely observed as she was, and taken out for many months once again. When she returned, she was a zombie. She stopped cleaning herself. Stopped trying to eat. She quit taking care of herself and that was another thing for the kids to pick on her about. I tried to keep her head above the water, but as the "suicidal freaks" best friend, I was being attacked too. Soon our fellow students were drowning us both in cruel words and brutal actions and snide rumors. I was sinking down with her, but my descent was silent. Self harm in secret places. Crying myself to sleep into my pillow so nobody could hear me. Writing suicide notes in my notebook to calm myself down and remind myself death could save me from all the torture at any time. I came to realize my classmates were not children, but monsters in human skin. They had tried to **** my friend, were still killing her. And now they were killing me. Ripping away my hope for the future and any love I held for the world, pulling away my idea that people were inherently good and replacing it with the concept that people were beasts who wanted to destroy me because they could. Because the one who made us so sad we killed ourselves would be the winner of the twisted game, because our deaths would be something to laugh at, just like her attempted suicide was. It's been six years now, and some part of me is still drowning in that ocean of sadness. I haven't heard from her since her last attempted suicide, a few years ago. Because she never got better either. She's still drowning too. And the monsters? I still walk among them every day. Their eyes slide past me like I'm not even there, like they don't even remember the child they ripped out of me. Like destroying a part of me was the simplest, most meaningless thing in the world.

I think I'm going to be a recluse. Write novels in a shack with cats until I get arrested or evicted for not paying taxes or something. Then get arrested for vagrancy and go to jail and write more about how messed up the world is. If I get out, I'll go back to being a vagrant. I'll let my hair get long and matted and I'll let my nails grow long and black and I'll dig my own grave with them and I'll smell like dust and decay and death. I'll give up. I'll resign from humanity.

i just watched forever slip into fifteen minutes. and then i watched fifteen minutes turn into nothing at all.

I'm thinking I'd take all the bad back, just to have the good with it. But I know that's not the right line of thinking. But I want to. You've returned to my life for two days, and I'd already prefer waking up stuck to my sheets with the blood leaking from the wounds you made to waking up with just a text from you. ****, ****. You're poison but you know I won't go anywhere.

My friends say I'm building a bridge back to hell by getting back in touch with you, but that's okay.

If hell is where you're waiting for me, hell is where I'll go.

*Chasing something that died a long time ago.

You are now torturing me on purpose, i swear it.

Because now you are with her around every corner that i ever occupy, every hallway that neither of you ever walked down until now.

You only want the pain my love brings, not the actual love. You want me to hurt you, to scar you, to damage you in every possible way. You smile when I tell you I love you because it means I won't ever leave, not because you genuinely want to be loved somewhere deep inside. You know that I'll rip you apart because you like it, you know that you can tear me up too and I'll take it and I'll love it because it's you. Because we're both sick, sadomasochistic people in every sense of the word, and we'll destroy each other and savor every moment, even though it destroys something inside of me that wants to stroke your hair and kiss your forehead and make you feel loved. The part of me that sings when I'm taking care of the mess I made of you, the part that blossoms when I tell you you're beautiful and you blush.
And then there's the monster you grew inside of me. The one that would rather ******* eat you than let you go. The one that screams and howls when you mention your last mistress, the one that wants to devour your heart and keep your soul in my ribcage. The one that aches because you only want me to own you when it hurts.

All of me aches, because you only want me when it'll hurt.

"You're beautiful" isn't the compliment that it used to be, you know. Because what happens to beautiful girls in this world is anything but. Your beauty is used against you, used to target and mark and blame you. "I couldn't help it, you're so beautiful." When they touch you without your permission. Girls hate you because you're beautiful. Men turn their sickness on you. You're scarred by the greed of someone who wants to touch you and thinks they can because you're beautiful, scarred by the envy of people who can't look like you, who don't realize what beauty really does to people. They notice you because you're beautiful and they don't care about anything else. You're just a pretty doll that they think they can play with anytime they want, that they can blame their actions against you on you because you're beautiful. Because "I couldn't help myself" is said in a way too complimentary tone from someone you didn't want to touch you. Sometimes you just want to take it all away. Shave your head, burn your body. Waste yourself away into nothing, till there isn't a trace left of beauty to blame. Till you're invisible and not worth targeting anymore. But there will be other beautiful girls for some sick **** to target and destroy. Someday, you're all going to destroy the beautiful girls in the world. You're going to destroy all of them and complain about it. Because how dare they take their beauty away from you? Even though you're the ones who ruined it. Ruined it for everyone and made all the beautiful girls destroy themselves to get away from you. Make girls afraid to be ugly because you're all focused on the beautiful girls, when really, you're the ******* ugly ones. Punish them for not being beautiful. Punish them for being beautiful. Punish them for everything because you can. Say what you will, but beautiful is twisting. I've ceased to make sense. I'm not sleeping right. I'll make this make sense later, maybe. Or maybe I won't, because even as I write this, I'm afraid of not being thought of as beautiful. Because you're punished either way, and is it better to be targeted than ignored? I'm trying to remember when I was the ugly duckling kid and nobody talked to me, versus now when I'm targeted for destruction. I don't remember what was worse. I don't remember, so it scares me either way.

All you ever did was believe in me and all I ever did was this. I am so ******* sorry. You thought I had changed and healed and you thought that I could keep getting better, but I can't, I'm sorry, I just can't. Jesus ******* hell, girl. Why did I ever let you believe in me....why did I ever let you like me?

You're hiding all your sins in me. All your urges and twisted thoughts and deviance. You're trying to unleash it all on me, stain me with the filthiest parts of your mind, and blow off the steam and anger you try to keep so far inside yourself. You're taking all the scary, *****, unnatural parts of yourself and forcing them all on me, so you can keep yourself clean for her. So you can be her guardian angel, her knight in shining armor. Without blackened wings, or being covered in blood and oil. Stay the **** away from me. I don't need this. I don't, I really don't. You're trying to push all your darkness off on me, all the taints of lust and violence and anger and sadism that you don't want her to see. You can't do this forever. So keep adding to your own suffering. Have your shining little princess and your throne of ****. It'll all come down someday.

and they call me spectrum, like the colors flashing through the crowded room and the different spectrum of souls found inside.

i wish i could break every bone in your body,
just to show you what you did to my heart.

wishing i tasted of something other than cherries and sin.

Sitting in math class realizing we are perpendicular lines who will never cross again.

I still feel like I'm suffocating beneath the weight of your memories

And I hate you and I hate her and I hate the empty cavity in my chest where my heart used to be

And my own insecurities are eating me

God please help me.

and sometimes, i think about how i'm not very good at loving without the sting.

because my love is a tiger, a thornbush. my love is ****** teeth in the dark and hungry marks all across your skin, lovebites.

my love makes you ache and swallows you, searches for the most vulnerable, broken parts and occupies them.

so please understand, that i do want you to happy. and i really don't want to see you hurt. (but in the very same breath that i tell you that i hold your joy above all else, my poison mouth drips with possession, with making you mine.)

I don't want to write about how you're destroying me in ways I still didn't know I could break, but you are. I still won't say the words, the words make it real. If I say the words, I'll have to do something about it. I won't. I won't ever leave you.

But when you think about it as often as I do, wouldn't it become normal for you, too?

Hey, galaxy boy. I've got a girlfriend now, and she's more beautiful than anyone else I've ever seen. She smiles and her eyes glow and she just lights me up. She looks great in my jacket, you know, the oversized dark blue one with lime green stripes that you hated. My friends don't approve. Neither does my family. Everyone says she's nothing but trouble. But now, she's my trouble. So I don't wanna hear a **** word about it from anyone. You always hated her, anyways. So it's none of your business if she writes the date we got together on notes with hearts and gives them to me, or if she draws me Pon and Zi. And if she spams my phone with cute quotes, well, I'm happy about it. And if she gives me a necklace and kisses me in front of everyone, well, at least everyone knows she's mine.

You may have noticed, that words come less freely now.

That's because the pain has reached a level beyond them.

Today, I showered with the water on as hot as it gets and scrubbed my skin with half a bottle of soap until the water turned ice cold, until my skin stung and ached. Then I scrubbed my scalp with shampoo until my fingers came away ******. I filled my sink with cold water and dunked my face in, before emptying it and brushing my teeth until my gums bled. I used listerine and held it in my mouth as it burned the open skin, until it became fizz and I spat it out and went back to the tub and sat there and scrubbed my skin with my damp washcloth until it was raw. I sat in that tub and shoved a towel in my face and screamed, screamed until I fell into coughing fits, spitting up blood and phlegm in my bathtub. I got out and screamed again until my voice quit. My throat feels cut, my skin feels burnt, my scalp bleeding into my wet hair. I'm sitting on my soaking wet bathroom floor, head pressed to the wall, fingers red and peeling from destroying razors, eyes swollen from hours of tears. I don't know what to do. The past I fight so hard against holds me down, my reflex to cringe upon human contact, despite my efforts to ignore it, to take myself back. I do not want to move again. I want to die on my bathroom floor, cold tile on destroyed flesh, hair dripping red-tinged water. I want to die here in these puddles of lost innocence, of the greed of the world that was taken out on a girl who isn't even out of highschool. I want to die here in this room where I tried to rip away the sins of others, left on my flesh. I want to die here. I want to die.

I miss you.
2. You've got beautiful eyes. Such beautiful eyes. Honestly.
3. You have stardust in your eyelashes.
4. I'm not going to hurt you. I don't know if I ever did but if I did I'm sorry.
5. I'm so sorry I didn't just tell you how I felt. I should have done more to make you see it.
6. You called me really often. I really liked that.
7. When we'd talk at night and I'd start to get drowsy, it wasn't because you were boring me. It was because you relaxed me enough to sleep.
8. I think about you all the time.
9. I write about you all the time.
10. God, ****...I miss you. So ******* much.
11. Please come back. ******* please. **please.

and i'm afraid that soon, *there will be no one left that i love..

I'm still thinking of you. Of wide blue eyes and the long brown hair that falls in those eyes. Of beautiful lips and strong, shy hands and a soft voice. Of the way you love to sing and the way you smiled at me. I'm thinking of your collarbones and how I love the way you dress and how I could literally sleep next to you, hand and hand, body to body forever. How I don't typically like boys, you are the fifth ever, but I want you anyways. I've wanted girls, lusted and desired, but never lusted after a guy until I caught myself staring at your lips like they were made of sugar. I want to kiss you. I want to touch you. Please help me.

Please just pack your ****, take the gifts back, and ******* leave.

It's scary. Getting too familiar with another person. Knowing just the right way to kiss them and when you've become so familiar with someone's ****** structure that your noses no longer bump and you just fit together. When you know their favorite places to be touched and favorite ways and how to elicit the best sounds. Slipping into their favorite position and simply knowing they like it the best without ever having to say it. It's ******* terrifying, mapping out the geography of their body with your hands and knowing the feel of their skin and every mark on it. Memorizing their body instinctively and naturally going to the things you know they like. Being able to tell, with your eyes closed, the feel of something as simple as the back of a hand or the expanse of a back and knowing it is them, that is their skin. Being used to their smell on you. Tracing over their face with your fingertips and being able to feel it beneath your fingers even when you're apart. Makes it feel like they're a part of you, knowing your body knows their body and some primitive or maybe too advanced part of your brain knows every inch of them, can remember the feel of them in the slightest moment. It's got me scared as ****. You've got me scared as ****.

i feel like an addict going through withdrawal.

How many other people...Have you allowed to lie next to you....In that ******* bed...

Dr. Pepper and memories of you.

and my veins are singing to be freed from my skin.

And I am so sorry,
Because no matter how much I love you,
I will probably always feel distant.

I could love you more than anything in the world, but at the end of the day, I'll still feel a million miles away.

And it doesn't mean I love you any less,
When I drift away.

I just don't know what else to do,
I'm weak and I can't help it.

I'm sorry.

that this violent person is not me, and you have turned me into a beast.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if turned my alarm off and just slept until my parents woke me up, panicked because I slept late and will be late for school. I wonder what would happen if I told them I just wasn't going and refused to move. They can't physically make me go. They can't pick me up and carry me across ice to the car and drive me. They can't carry me into the building and set me down in a class. Let the police come. Arrest me for giving up and not following the rules of life anymore. Arrest me for quitting everything. Send me to jail. Beat me. I won't move a muscle. **** me. I just want the strength to quit entirely and just stop doing everything I don't want to do anymore, to stop feeling so the consequences don't matter. I just want to give up and stop.

smile like you don't wish you were dead.

Thinking of the first time you slapped me and how I was stunned, too stunned to react

And how it escalated from there, into scratching and biting and cutting and burning

And how the light in your eyes made me numb to the pain

And how the taste of my blood in your mouth suddenly became heaven

And how you ran your fingers through my hair and told me you knew you could do anything and I'd still be right there

And how you were ******* right, you're still ******* right because the second you call me love, I accept all of the poison just to have you back.

And now you're leaving to go fly planes and I don't know what to do anymore

I do not know how to get lost in you.

You trail your frozen fingertips across my arms and curl me close to you and smile, making jokes and creating your own nonsense words and phrases, drawing me in to your almost-black eyes.

I laugh at your imagination and rub your wrists as you draw circles on the back of my hands and lean on me, letting me relax into you.

Yet, I do not know how to deal with a boy who doesn't constantly try to touch more intimate places, who doesn't constantly talk about *** and isn't always asking for more.

I do not know how to deal with your tender compliments and small smiles and how you always say being cute is a personality trait, too.

All in all, I do not know how to deal with you, my only place to rest besides in words.

But I can try.

It doesn't matter what I do.

To the world around me, I am always going to be "his Taylor."

My ex-turned-best-friend. I've been referred to as "his turf." "His Taylor." And just "oh, she's his."

No matter how hard we try to show the world we're just friends.

I'm always "his."

You were my muse, babe. You made all that poetic **** come running out of my fingers, a waterfall of galaxy eyes and feathery hair and thin fingers and shy lips. A stream of false promises I almost believed in and outer space and the comets in your head, a slow trickle of something a lot like love that slowly thrummed in my heart and the glassy purity about you. You were like a song I could have listened to forever, a beautiful boy with a heartbeat like a hummingbird. It's really too bad you forgot me, because I didn't forget a moment of you.

Sometimes, my depression and anxiety seem almost manageable.

Other times, they're suffocating. I wake up and immediately wish I hadn't. I don't want to talk, I don't want to move. I almost can't convince myself to do anything at all.

Sometimes, it gets so bad that I just hide under the covers for hours, convinced that if I play dead long enough, I'll finally be safe. Like if I move, or show any sign of life, everything I'm afraid of will crush me all at once.

I am 17 and so scared to live I almost can't stand to.

Inevitably returning so the sickness inside of me doesn't spill out into his ears and sneak into his brain. Poison from the wounds festering in my sad soul needs to be released, and I won't have it staining the person who has become heaven in a physical body.

I still stick around you, even when you're a *******, because I remember when you weren't. I remember the time I went to hug you and I ended up falling into your lap and the surprise, the soft chuckles, the bad jokes. I remember the time I was drawing on your pizza box and you were opening up to me and I turned and looked at you and told you I thought you were great, I remember the way you smiled perfectly, how open your eyes were. I remember when we were having an embarrassingly personal conversation in a public place and we pinky promised and you held my pinky with yours, even after the promise bit ended. And I remember when you said you missed me and how it made my chest feel, wrenching because I miss you, too, I miss you...My chest hurts now knowing things will never be the same, that we'll probably never be close again. But I still stay near you, because I remember what was.

I am finally finished with you and everything you are.

(So why do I feel like my heart has been ripped from my chest?)

I dreamed of you last night. You sat in my house and said you missed me. You said you had missed me for the past several months, that I hadn't left your mind. You haven't left my mind. I will spend the next 24 hours wishing and hoping it was real. That in some way, I'm running through your mind. I miss you. Please call me.

You probably shouldn't love me.

I will write about every detail I adore, paint you with brilliant vocabulary words that you will never hear come out of anyone's mouth, and idolize every breath you take.

I will romanticize your eyelashes and hands and the way your lips curve into a smile, slip you into every simile and metaphor, and my work will have you in every beat.

And when you inevitably crush me and let me down, (like everyone else), I will write our ending like some beautiful tragedy, and every so often, a nostalgia-inspired piece about you will arise.

So darling, darling, please. Do not bring me up just to crush me beneath my own glass dreams.

So there's this ghost I know. It's of the you that's gone. He sneaks into my bed at night and slips beneath the covers and holds my hand with his icy, not-quite-real hand and I can almost feel him next to me. It's like he's almost real, strumming his guitar and brushing my hair back, and in the pitch black of night, he could be a physical being. Except he isn't, I'm not sure if he's a ghost or a manifestation my mind made up because I can't accept the person I loved so wildly has become someone I don't understand, someone whom I can't even hold a conversation with anymore. I don't mind that he exists in my bed in the dark now, except in my half-awake half-dream state, I can almost smell him, almost feel him.

But he's not truly there. I am alone with something my mind made up, or maybe I share my bed with a ghost, a part of a person's soul who loved me so deeply it split from the rest of him so he could be by my side forever. I don't know. I don't care.

As your fingertips traced my freckles into constellations, I wished I could have loved you, instead.

i'm thinking of the galaxies in his eyes and the stars in his lashes and the dark silk that's his hair and how soft it looked, how soft it was and how the fringe was up just a little bit and how for some odd reason, it made me think of feathers. and of how soft his hands were, how uncertain and when his arm was around me and he bent and kissed me but moved back like he'd been burned and how his laugh sounded over the phone and how his lips danced around my name...how huge and dead his pupils were, how lost when he looked at me-but not really at me, past me, through me-for the last time..

****, I've got little people living in my bones, running their electricity through my veins and eating my marrow and breathing my lung - oxygen and drinking my gastric acids and ****, this is what it's like for a star to die, to implode and become a black hole or millions and trillions of stardust particles floating around in the universe.