Dead flowers in the empty wine bottle
I chugged last week.
It was a Thursday, nothing special,
but I was glowing.
Cheeks vibrant with a buzzed rose.
Eyes half closed, but who cares?
I’m living.

Living in the moment,
spinning on the hardwood floor.
A place where I once sobbed
over things that I still can’t wrap my brain around.
The floorboards can still feel my pain,
but tonight I dance to their creaks.
I’m living.

Remember when I lost my grip a year and a half ago?
I was my own best friend and
emptiness was my favorite feeling.
But I can’t seem to keep hold of everything at once.
It’s either me,
or it’s you.

Like the flowers in the wine bottle,
I can’t keep watering something that’s dead,
when all I want to do is keep touching, feeling, growing.

Don’t pull my roots tighter to the soil
once I’m finally living.

Pieces of myself that I gave away
came back to me shattered
in every which way.

Something is changing and
I don’t know what,
but I don’t feel the same.

So many thoughts I’ve never said,
I’m beyond tired of holding my breath.
The things I’ve been feeling deep within,
I don’t ever want to feel again.

The water is rising in my lungs,
and I am drowning from the inside out.
I can’t ever seem to find solid ground
but I always make sure to keep kicking,

constantly searching for the coast.
So pour a glass, make a toast.
Because here’s to recovery,
the thing I’ve searched for the most.

eat-ing dis-or-der
/ēdiNG diˈsôrdər/
noun
1. Waking up every single morning with the same thoughts you’ve had for the past 9 months. How flat will I look today? Are my ribs poking out any further? Does my spine look any more sickly than before?
2. Weighing yourself before you go to the bathroom. Then after you go to the bathroom. Proceeding on and on throughout the day, as followed.
3. Being so hungry, you’re simply not hungry anymore. More so, just exhausted. (Being exhausted is a good thing, because that’s when you can finally fall asleep. That way your mind doesn’t have to keep nagging you about the hunger pains you feel in your stomach.)
4. Wearing 2 sweatshirts & 2 pairs of socks under 3 blankets, yet still feeling the icy pain running through your veins. You try anything to stay warm. Coffee helps, but only for a few minutes. Steaming hot showers are nice for the time being, but stepping out into the cold air, feeling your already brittle hair turn into shards...it’s hell. (Ironic, right?)
5. Not being able to walk past a mirror without pulling up your shirt to check your stomach for the 20th time today. I’m not vain, trust me. Far, far from it. One of the last things I’m capable of feeling right now is love towards myself.
6. Longing for a way out. Laying on your bed in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, just wishing that there was a ******* off switch to all of this. Every ******* morning to every ******* night. You know what you’re doing is wrong, but at this point you don’t know who you’d be without it. That voice, I mean. That voice that never goes silent, even when you politely beg with tears brimming at the eyes. You try so hard to push it away, and to remember a time in your life when you were “normal”. When you could wake up and actually enjoy breakfast. It was your favorite meal of the day.

Now, you can’t even fathom a “favorite meal”. The empty plate, the clean spoon, the untouched napkin. Everything except the food- which is now harrowingly the perfect vision of your “favorite meal”.

I feel nothing but
riptides in my stomach,
lightning pulsing through my hands,
and sunbursts in my eyes.

Accompanied by
pink flower flushed cheeks,
cool ocean fingertips,
and slightly burnt thighs.

we
are on, but

your headlights
are off.

I always wondered why, but now I understand.
I wanted our love to be known,
not shielded by the four doors of your car.

I don’t want to fade away
alongside the tangerine dream of summer.

I don’t have the right to miss you,
because you were never actually mine.
You were just a passing day,
a place and a time.
Your eyes burned through my skin worse than
the sun does in mid-July.
Your fingertips lightly imprinted my neck
and lit me up brighter than the early summer fireflies.
But this thing we built collided into nonexistence
when the cold came.
Because without the heat I was now nothing,
but a lifeless flame.
Soot covered branches, burnt and cracked.
All I felt was tears, when all I wanted to hear
was your laugh.

But I didn’t just lose you,
I lost all of the best parts of myself, too.

You had taken my warm June heart and
somehow turned it into a January afternoon.
I yearned to be painted a shimmering gold,
no longer a toneless blue.
So I started caring for myself the way
I used to care about you.
I tried my hardest to scrub my wine stained soul clean.
I woke up, realizing there’s so much life to live,
I was only nineteen.
The seasons changed and so did my mind,
and I finally felt myself let you go,
after all this **** time.

Are we long gone? I ask myself, when there’s still traces of your freckles etched into the walls of my mind. I close my eyes, and can still feel your wet lips pressed against the sweaty crook of my neck. I can’t help but want your tongue, but I’m too busy biting on my own instead. I reach for you, only 7 minutes away. I take the long way home every time. There’s still a lingering of your scent that’s packed in drawers, crumpled to the back. I can’t seem to wash you away. Drunken spillage of red wine comes out easier than you.

-I’m about to hit send. I’m sorry for ******* with your closure. // 9pm