There's break lights in every direction.
I can't stand this deafening silence.
Your lips are pressed together tightly.
My eyes wander towards the sky.
We quietly sit through endless traffic
While tourists and businessmen walk by.
We're as stubborn as they come.
No one claims the first word.
We silently sit through stop lights.
During the quietest hour I've endured.
I search for a sufficient apology.
I can't seem to keep still.
We may not live on forever.
This regret sure as hell will.

I just need you to be here
Because it's raining in my mind
And you aren't here to hold
The umbrella over me this time.

You rub the sleep from your eyes,
Pick up your needle and thread
That you keep so conveniently placed
In the drawer of the nightstand
That sits on your side of the bed.
My nightmares shook you awake at 2am again.
So you sew me back together
My tattered, loose clothing has begun
To tear at the seams.
You put the breath back into my lungs
So that oxygen can begin once again
To flow smoothly through my bloodstream.
I've been falling apart so much more frequently,
Or so it seems.
You spend the early hours of the morning
With a needle clumsily resting between your fingers
Drawing tiny beat red beads of blood
Each time you ***** yourself,
You waste a whole night of sleep
To end up feeling like hell in the morning
So how could you think for a second
I wouldn't hop out of bed,
Throw on ***** jeans
Disregarding the still torn, frayed up seams
And drive through the snow or the rain or the dark
Just to calm your nerves and hold you
Until the shaking stops
And your breathing begins again.
I will spend the earliest hours of the day
Driving to your house to ensure that you're safe
And when you find yourself panicked
And scared and alone
And fraying and tearing and trapped in your head
Don't ever doubt for a second that I still remember
Where you keep the tools you use to repair me
In the drawer of the nightstand
That sits next to your side of the bed.

Sometimes I worry there will come a day
Where you study my writing, frantically searching
For where you hold your place.
Questioning, "Could a writer truly love me
If I can't find myself in the subtext of her words?"
And you'll spend your nine to five distracted
Replaying each stanza and line in your head
Blindly searching for a hint of your importance
In the way I arranged the alphabet into scribbles on a pad.
And when you wrack your brain and still
There's no sense of you in any of it
Your thoughts will race with ideas that you are not worth
My messy handwritten interpretations of my emotions.
I have not put you into my own order of letters and phrases
And praised you in metaphors and vague comparasons
Because even if I tried to write it out point blank
I'd never have the poetic ability
To piece together a beautiful enough string of words
That would ever do you justice.
You are worth more than any sloppy stream of consciousness
And even the most intricate metaphor.
If I cannot capture your importance in words perfectly
I will not attempt to at all.

It’s a constant knot in my gut

And lump in my throat
,
I’m always stuck between the feeling

Of either bursting into tears or throwing up
.
And my chest feels like it’s either caving in 

Or being torn apart

And I worry about the permanent damage

Left behind by the war between my head

And my heart.

I keep my hands balled into fists to keep anyone from seeing

My dull jagged nails and torn cuticles that never stop bleeding

Due to the hours I spend tearing at my skin.

Maybe I’ll rip enough away to let some of the sickness spill out

And the sunlight spill in.

The doctors called me a wolf biter, due the way that I chew and I tear 

At the flesh that surrounds each of my fingernails.
The same way a wolf gnaws on the flesh of its prey

Using its nails and its teeth to shred the outer shell away.

I back myself into a corner and paralyze me with fear

Then turn around and destroy the body keeping me here.
Maybe soon I'll peel back all my skin

And make myself disappear.
A wolf biter, because I allow myself to simultaneously become

Both the hunted, running scared, and the hunter out for blood.

Midnight marked the twenty year anniversary
Of my arrival here. It led me straight to
The grey area between teenage antics
And the road to adulthood and a career.
Weighed by the pressure to get it together
But still not old enough to buy a beer.
And twenty sounds so young
In relation to all the time I have left
But sounds too old to be stuck in the rut I'm in
While my peers are riding on success.
Did I fall behind somewhere,
And when?
Or is my pace just fine
For someone with such an unsteady maze of a mind?
I've reached a standstill in my life but they tell me
My story is just now beginning to unfold.
I gave my dreams a head start in hopes my passion would grow with time
But I've been chasing them in this foot race
And I've let myself fall behind.
Twenty years seems plenty young in light of medicine today
Allowing us to expand our life expectancy at such a high rate.
But I feel I'm wasting so much time when I realize it's been two decades.
I have more ideas than my head can hold
But when they sound the alarm and try to make an escape
Every emergency exit gets backed up and crowded leaving me in a state
Of anxiety and panic and I lose all motivation.
It's like when my brother told me the things we fear most
Are the only things worth doing in life
But the future leaves me feeling like I'm standing sixty stories high
Blending into the city skyline, glancing over the edge
And my intrusive thinking brings on visions
Of a fatal plunge to the rush hour traffic below
And I step back and shake off tunnel vision
Choking back nausea from vertigo.
Two decades into my time on earth, I'm still just a baby
I've learned the bare essentials
And was dropped off on my own
With nothing but limited knowledge of the "real world"
They've tried so long to protect me from.
And the sugar coating that they sprinkle over every word they say
Was always too sickeningly sweet, I can no longer stomach "It will be okay."
And they've left me with a harsh reality to face and a mouth full of teeth that have decayed.
And twenty years is just the start of the life that's directed exclusively by me
Unscripted, raw, and entirely too real
The way they never explained life turns out to be.

I find it a bit unsettling how

The more familiar a house becomes

The more I begin to fear it.

Perhaps it is because over time

I begin to learn the finer details

Like where the silver wear is kept,
Or where the person split their forehead

On the banister at the bottom of the steps

And their father took them to get stitches

While their mother complained 

About the blood stains on the floor.

I memorize the creaks in the stairs

And learn where not to put my feet

So I can quietly leave,

Undetected in the morning.

I feel haunted in the comfort

Of another one’s home because

The moment I begin to treat it as my own

I start to learn about all the secrets,

The ghosts in the walls

And the past that built the foundation.

I wonder if this is treatable

Or if I’ll live with this homesickness forever.