Passed

I wanted to love you so badly

And I did

When your fingertips first met mine I knew of the novels we would write of the next 60 years worth of adventures

I was 15, wanted someone to open me up rather than fold me up into the pocket sized person I wasn’t

I was 15 and wanted to see what death actually felt like

You were 16 and didn’t yet have the vocabulary of your pain

Hints of you still hide under my skin

They made a home of my ribcage

You were still  beautiful the last time I saw you

My heart splintered remembering you no longer adventured by my side

One day, where there is no more pain

We will drift back to love one another again

Suicide wasn’t in my vocabulary until I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital at 14 under suicidal ideation

All I could feel was a severe empty nothingness

Spiraling in and out of a reality no one wanted

With addictions no 14 year old should know about outside of health class

If I don’t keep my hands busy I fade away into a world no one exists but myself

I doodle, write, crochet just to keep myself here

Suicide was once a part of me I knew would snap into place one day

It was a date, it was a home I had built myself, it was a reality I was sure of

Now it only exists as a memory that surfaces days that I don’t think I can push through

She still visits me but only in my dreams

 

Trouble

Too many of our dreams died between classroom walls

Hissed within hallways the lack of worth we held in our palms

I was queen of detentions

Spending half my career there while still getting accepted to a 4 year university

The 80s were long gone but my friends and I lived like those movies

Trying to kill the pain we harbored on our skin

Eating away our minds

Friends spending lunch getting higher and higher in the parking lot

We smoked cigarettes in bathrooms

Nearly burning down the prison filled with people who used words like knives

Fists like bullets

Trying to take us out one at a time so there was more to whisper in between the very classrooms we drafted our suicide notes

We lived on the drug trail made for addicts like us

Nicotine, alcohol, any drugs we could get our greedy hands on

Staples in diets of people like us

What can an underfunded public school in the suburbs really do for students trying to warm the bones that froze over in thoughts of bleeding until there was no more blood left in us?

Our minds had already quit on us as we took turns in psychiatric wards

We smoked in the dugout

Under bleachers

Trying to outrun death so our parents wouldn’t find us in the rafters

Because the illness eating us away took us first

I mean the hushed whispers told us we were better off gone because we were worth nothing

We all became nothing, I mean you start believing them eventually

The school couldn’t stop them since they were varsity athletes and we were the dirt on the bottom of their shoes

I mean we were just the druggies

No one needed us anyways

How to Kill Yourself Without Actually Dying

 

 

Option 1: Stay in the closet

Be with someone of the gender you’re not attracted to

Convince yourself it’s right even though you know damn well it’s wrong

It’s like you’re suffocating yourself

Option 2: Fall in love with someone who will never love you back

It’s as addicting as the drugs sold on the streets

You know, the kind that collapse your veins and make your heart stop

Option 3: Stop acknowledging your emotions

Then you no longer feel your heart being ripped to shreds

It’ll hurt more when you try to start feeling again

Those emotions you subdued for so long acted as the elephant in the living room

Option 4: Forgive yourself for everything you didn’t say

It’ll feel like you’re drowning

You know it’ll be too late

It doesn’t hit you until now that swallowing those love notes

Hurts more than it would’ve whispering them with your warm breath into her neck

Option 5: Give up on making everyone happy

You’re always going to disappoint someone

Maybe your mom will disown you

Maybe your sister will stop speaking to you

This will never stop feeling like you’re swallowing poison

Or jumping off that bridge

Your family’s disapproval will always sting

No matter how far you run away

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Mental Health Education

Things I would tell my 13 year old self if I got the chance:

That emptiness you feel is not normal

You know how you feel submerged in the Atlantic mid-winter? That numbness?

It’s called depression

It’s going to get worse before it gets better

One day you’re going to know the details of your own death

You’re suicidal but you don’t know there is even a word for it

You don’t know

You think this drowning is normal

Five years later and you’re still tearing yourself open

I’m sorry

I’m so sorry

There are so many scars

That won’t pack their bags and leave

But you’re still alive

You’re going to make it

Cooking for Two

Your name is a book collecting dust on my shelf

That I haven’t read for years

Because I already know the ending too well

I started smoking again to get the taste of your lips

Out of my memory

As if every exhale takes a fragment of you out of my soul

Kissing people doesn’t make me forget the way your lips felt on mine

It just makes me remember how ours fit perfectly

I chase down vodka with Coke

I have this delusion that if I get drunk enough to forget my own name

Maybe I’ll forget you too

But after a few shots my chest gets all fuzzy

Just like the first time I kissed you

I guess sometimes true love comes at the wrong time

Your fingerprints are still tattooed across my body

No matter how many people I let crawl into my bed

You’re still living in my heart

I still see your smile everywhere

I hear your voice beckoning to return to your warm embrace

As if I’m not trying

But your arms aren’t open yet

I’m ripping each word you breathed into my neck

Out of my skin

You no longer live here

So why do I keep setting a place for you at the table

And cooking for two

Category 5

You’ll truly know when someone was good for you 6 months after you stop speaking

For example, he gets mad at what I post on social media

Yet he follows me on nothing anymore – we aren’t even Facebook friends -thus he must do some hardcore stalking

He cut me off many moons ago

He also has a new girlfriend

Is she ok with this?

 

You tell your friends I’m the one who did you wrong

But I handed you the gun the day I first kissed you

I dug my own grave

Now I lay in the coffin with a bullet to the heart

You keep the gun in your dresser now

I guess you won the battle

But you won’t win the war

 

I’m still a work in process

I’m a town after a category 5 hurricane

Don’t tell me I never did anything for you

When I gave you everything I had

My heart is still black and blue

Yet I’m back on my feet

Just let me live

It’s my turn to let go

Shades of Depression

Depression for some people is cobwebs growing where their emotions were regulated

Feeling emptier than a gas tank with half a drop of fuel left

Depression for some people is laughing and joking all day

To go home and have barely enough energy to play with their fingers

Depression for some people is a sunset

They feel like their life is on its last leg and they’re beautifully fading

Wait until they see what it looks like from the outside – ratty hair, sunken eyes, a distance that is silent but deadly

Depression manifests differently from person to person

You can’t compare one depressive episode to another

No one’s suffering is less than another

It’s all the same lightless tunnel

Everyone with depression can agree the lack of beauty that comes with it

 

I want my years of suffering back

I lost so much blood

I still feel so broken

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Second Chances

Somewhere out there a person believes that you shouldn’t give second chances

Because they never change, they just get better at lying

I think everyone deserves a chance to redeem himself

But you have to know when to stop giving chances

If he keeps telling you he’s kicking it with some buddies

But you find a message to another girl on his phone saying “I love you baby I can’t wait to see you again tonight” time stamped an hour ago

It’s time to leave his sorry ass

You have been a fleeting thought in his mind for long enough that he has found another

If your best friend is addicted to drugs and has been in and out of rehab and jail

Your chance to intervene is gone

She has to want to fetch help for herself, you can’t do it for her

Believe it or not you can’t  save everybody

You have to watch them crumble to the ground, no matter how much it breaks your heart

Just remember to be good enough that when someone comes back to you and admits they made a mistake bigger than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa

Let them back in and let them prove to you that they have changed their ways

Don’t be so cold hearted that polar bears and penguins won’t survive

Happy

Recently people have been telling me I seem much happier

Along with this I get people asking for advice on how to be happy

Because I haven’t always been “happy”

I have a lot to say to them

Many days you won’t want to  get out of bed

Yet something in the back of your head pushes you out from under the covers

A lot of days you end up feeling neutral

Thankful you’re not as lethargic as you use to be

You’re not happy every moment of the day

There are moments you feel rain pouring behind your eyes

Most of the time I feel content

Friends of mine watch my eyes wander and observe the world around me

Because I missed everything for so long I want to soak in every little detail

Like the way clouds absorb colors of a sunset

Content is the only way to describe this neutral feeling – a feeling of neither the lowest of lows or highest of highs

As if I’m floating through life

Taking the space I was promised the day I was born