It is one thing to be haunted by past loves and loss
But it is another to be haunted by the person you have made me

I am forced to live with the girl who is terrified of being.
We all have our demons. We always will.
Mine are no bigger than yours, yet the fact remains
That we are all equally as frightened of dealing with them.
Many days I spend in complete and utter solitude,
Trying my best to be proud of myself or give any
Credit to my name for any good or purposeful thing I have done.
I'm terrible with compliments. Not in the cute, girly way
Where you smile and giggle and say "thanks" and blush
Nah, I literally feel like crying.
I'm messed up.
I lived with someone who accidentally showed me
What it means to be inherently selfish
What it means to be downright nasty and steely cold towards
People that they were supposed to care for.
And it has wrecked me. I lost my sense of identity.
I was so busy walking on eggshells and quieting
My own rights, feelings, and thoughts,
That I started not to have any.
I was kind of brutal. Pushed every single friend away.
Pushed family away. Bombed school.
The human psyche is such an expansive tool.
If we spend our time treating others wrongly,
It messes up the one chance we have at living.
I forgot how to live.
I wasn't taught how to live.
I lost myself.
I always used to imagine this white electric string
Like some new-agey stuff
It was connected to all people for before time and after.
If you're gonna be born next year, the rope has a place for you
Picked out, shiny, bright, ready to showcase you to the world
And if you are miscarried, the rope keeps swinging
On to the next person.
The next birth.
I imagined all of our consciousness' were tied to that string.
That is how we can think the same thoughts and speak languages
How we have souls, maybe the string is the soul
If it always existed then it can always exist
This was my logic
And I got so lost and away from myself
That I imagined I was cut off from the rope
It was the only time I went through with trying
To take my own life.
I thought it was a cruel joke that I could still think about it while
Being so disconnected from it.
I felt abandoned and shunned.
I felt like I could never return.
My panic attacks became violent and life threatening.
Nobody knows, I never told anyone.
When I tried to ask for help for my panic
From my mother
She dismissed me.
Irony would have it that she was also the one
To disconnect me from myself.
So over the years I have fought to rejoin the string
I am back with you people
I am alive again and I expect to stay.
When my time on the rope expires,
It will not be of my own hand.
Because my mother gave me one gift
Accidentally, of course
My mother taught me never to let
Someone else dictate my place
On the String of Consciousness.

What is the meaning of meaning you ask
As if understanding could even unmask
The word described by the word is just cagey
And the search for it, well, that’s pretty new agey

Perhaps it’s the happiness, before we focus on dread
Our beauty that’s fleeting before we are dead
It hums in the silence, it leaps through the air,
It thrives in knowing — and not knowing — it’s there.

Yesterday whispered, “You’re nothing at all,”
Today stretches forward, a tentative call.
Tomorrow might gift me a torchlight, a spark,
Or leave me still wandering blind in the dark.

It’s both the climb and the ache in our knees.
It’s both the summers warmth and the winter’s freeze
It shouts in our triumph, but it hides when we lose,
An whisper of a mumble that will only confuse.

The search for the question, or the answer’s pursuit,
An enigma of itself that will never compute
A cosmic conundrum, a riddle, a game—
the meaning of meaning is one and the same.

Heavy heaving with weights on my ankles, I battle to keep moving, but it’s all in slow motion.
Used to be I could skip sprightly in every direction open to me. A spirit helpfully pushed from behind.
I could climb to high tree limbs, walk for miles, run and jump and dance with abandonment.
But now it’s as if I’m mimicking the journey through bramble and against the river’s current.

Every step, every thought, every plan seems to melt against me, keeping my body and brain still.
Sometimes the effort is so debilitating, the random thoughts so destructible, that stasis takes over.
I am the actor in a film slowed to reveal the motion of running arms and legs, music to match.
Drugs, *****, new agey solutions are no match for the all-consuming paralysis of my soul, my will.  

I want to feel as if I’ve come up for air. I want to feel as if I am of purpose and meaning in this world.
I want to wake up each morning without that brick sitting on my chest and restraints on my will.
I want to feel the steady and true motion of my body and soul, with my heart hanging on for good measure.
I want to laugh without irony, pure and full. I want to reclaim my dawn and appreciate the coming dusk.