Drowning

Sometimes I forget to breathe.

Sometimes I hold my breath long enough for my lungs to collapse.

Sometimes I think I love the desperation for oxygen, that gasping half-dead inhalation.

It makes me feel alive.

Sometimes the weight of my words creates an anchor around my ankles that constantly pulls my head under and I know that everyone has their demons and that just because they carry it well doesn’t mean it is not equally as heavy.

But sometimes I compare my life to a car crash.

A car crash that I survive.

The car crashes and I crash with it, but I still survive, and what I mean is that I don’t survive. I live through the disaster, but I don’t survive it. The car is dead but I am still here to remember the screeching tire, shattered glass, and crash of it all.

Most days, my poems are composed of only the words why stuck on repeat like a scratching record.

That’s the thing, there is always somebody left behind.

There is always somebody left.

And sometimes you don’t heal right. That’s all.

They give you a timeline they allow you to feel sympathy and then, at a certain point, it’s “a pity party.” They tell you it wasn’t that deep, that worse things happen to better people and that you’re lucky to have your tongue and your teeth.

And sometimes recovery feels strange because for so long I got used to the loudness. The presence of pain and screaming thoughts in the back of my head became something I could rely on.

Everyone always says it gets better, but the truth is sometimes your situation doesn’t change, you do.

So when the pain begins to ease there’s a quiet that is so difficult to become accustomed to. And yet, I know this is what I need, it is what I must fall in love with to replace my mind’s attraction to destruction.

The truth is, you eventually have to learn to come around to the fact that life is at times mind-numbingly boring and at times exhilarating, yet we must keep faith that one day life will be more appealing than illness.

Last night I cried about dropping a plate, but I was crying about the guilt wedged in-between my bones, I was crying about the heartache, I was crying about how my life isn’t anywhere near where I want it to be and how time doesn’t seem to be working right anymore.

But the words get over it echoed through my veins.

I cut my hands picking up the pieces.

That’s how it works: if you handle glass before you’re ready it only ever serves to make you bleed.