Tell me if it's wrong
Loving you
After everything, after all this time
'Cause I can't help missing the days when you were mine
And talking to you now aches a little bit
Mixed up, uneven nostalgia
I don't understand how my heart swells when I talk to you
After everything, after all this time
Why do I still want you to be
My everything, after all this time?

I will give you butterfly kisses
While you pretend not to notice my illness
Slowly, deeply
We destroy each other
My darling, enabling lover

Being a bomb is exhausting.
I am so tired of counting down.

I whisper "I wish I were beautiful" into a thin-necked bottle and quickly stop it up with a cork.
Carefully, I place this bottle on my bookshelf.
It is one of many.
I collect wishes but they loom instead of glitter;
The whispers,
They sound like the disorder that ate away at me when I was younger and this all feels so similar.
I bottle up these secret wishes and together the whispers collect into the screaming of my thoughts as I catch my reflection in the window in passing.
In private, I try to press myself together, to make myself more compact, as if somehow I could force all this fat into a more pleasing shape.
In private, I look at the picture I took when my stomach was near flat and my wrists were more dainty and though I know I would be in the hospital the month after that photo was taken I can't help but wish I looked like that again.
I whisper "Make me sick" into a thin-necked bottle and let it weigh down the air around me.
When did I start to believe dead would be better than this?

I will pick myself up off the floor
With sharpened teeth
I will shake
It's not exactly "brushing the dust off"
More like a punishment for feeling and acting out and breathing in someone else's space
I have holes in my neck and my back and my heart
Times I have stabbed myself, times others have stabbed me
Times I have thrashed my own body around, locked jaw and sharpened teeth
No one around cares to encourage me
So I have learned to punish me
Though I never seem to stand when I drop myself back on my feet
No one taught me gentle touches
But I know how to use my teeth

I see people take their heatbreak in their hands and mold it into poetry
The same way I did for Memory
(I see her in the lettering)
I wonder, tarnished souls,
If we will ever write a "last poem" for the ones who burned us
(It has been over a year, now, and I am still finding new blisters)
How long will we wait to grow new, thicker skin and try again?