Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror
while in tears, you're telling yourself repeatedly:
just hang on, one more day, hour, minute, second..
but you feel and look so helpless..?

Your sadness makes other people uncomfortable,
and so you learn to hide it.
You learn to cope
with humor and ***** and a busy sched.

Your body learns to smile
even when you're crumbling down inside,
to keep walking
even when you wanna fall to the ground in the middle of the road.

You've conditioned yourself to do all this
so well that even when the right people come around
who are willing to take in all your losses
and watch every single tear fall from your eyes,
you don't.

You smile.
You drink.
You keep walking.
But you can only do so for so long... how long

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, "O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

Sometimes it feels like I’m looking a stranger or maybe even a ghost in my mirror. Dark eyes with no sparkle stare back at me and part of me wonders when I started looking like a corpse. Meals get skipped more often than I actually eat and my body starts feeling like it’s made of glass that people keep breaking while she tries her hardest to put me back together. And when I get sick, because it always happens, it’s like my bones rattle as I shiver and each cough feels like my throat is being torn apart from the inside out and after each fit I try to be surprised that there’s no blood. When I’m asked about medical history I have to tell them I don’t know because I really don’t. I’m so stupidly afraid of getting some preventable but hereditary disease because I never knew it was in my genes. I find myself turning the same words over and over in my head while I lay in bed every night: they didn’t want you and they didn’t love you and it’s your fault. It’s gotten to the point where I believe the lies my anxiety-ridden subconscious tells me. The logical part of me knows the lies aren’t true but how do you console yourself in those lonely hours when you’re alone and no one can hear you cry yourself to sleep? Six nights a week it’s all fitful sleep and when I wake up I’m still so exhausted it takes everything I have just to haul myself out of bed to take the pill that makes it so I can just barely scrape by during school and even then it’s not good enough so I find myself failing and then I realize I just don’t care anymore. There is no in between for me, I can’t just kinda care it’s all or nothing and ninety nine percent of the time it’s nothing so I lose myself in my video games and ignore the screaming in the back of my skull that tells me to get up and do something productive with my life but I just can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to try it’s that I physically cannot make myself care enough to do anything and it’s almost like I can ******* feel my muscles begin to atrophy.

She told me she loves
days of green
when soft rain falls.
yet she always
seeks shelter
when it rains.

She told me she loves
the hot hazy days of summer
when cloudless sky
and relentless sun
bake the earth
yet she covers herself
with sunblock
and sits below a shady tree
when its sunny.

She told me she loves
the feel of the wind
as it wails in the night.
yey she closes the windows
and shutters when it is windy.

That is why
I am terrified of her
for today
she told me
she loves me.

A little boy once asked me
why I want to go away tomorrow
because he doesn’t understand
that’s what gets me through today.