From My Bipolar to My Mother’s Cancer

They are both trying to kill us

Eroded from the inside

There is no exact science to either of us

Though death haunts me like an easy escape if it gets just bad enough

Your hope outshines my disease

They both came just as swiftly but my diagnosis crept up years later

The darkness finally found its light

As if there were flowers growing there that I wasn’t looking for

All I had to do was turn the light on

The only difference between us is they take you more seriously when something is wrong

But each diagnosis is a hell with just our names painted on the door

No one else can feel it except for ourselves

Yes, there are support groups

But dying tastes different to each person

And I am living a death sentence

Eons of Pain

If pain were to be measured in lifetimes

I have seen the revolutions you read in history books

I know people eons old

Corroding themselves into the very dust they were born from

As they watched the stars form and collapse into themselves, avidly taking notes

Wise beyond this world

But this world won’t leave them alone

Stuck as ghosts, shells of their former selves

Maybes and what-ifs disturbing their sleep

Not enough scars or wrinkles showing the stories of their lives

No one wants to sit and listen to the advice of this weathered people

Plucked from worlds away to whisper stories of home into the wind

We all get labeled the same – crazy, lunatics, people who shouldn’t be on the outside

Yet we all have incredible stories to tell

So please, listen to those who have watched their world crumble and rose again

Before we are but whispers in the wind, returning home

 

Guilt of One Left Behind

There exists a place where she lives and I don’t

Where she survived and I succumbed

Let the illness float me downstream to a better existence

Where I did not have to blame myself for surviving this long

For what if she could have given more than I can?

I have a laundry list of people who should have survived but did not

Her name still burns in the past tense

My cousin, you watched me grow up

We both suffered one in the same

Addicts in our own rights, ill in an organ society still thinks shouldn’t get sick

I tried to join you a year and a half later

I bear a weight too heavy for me to carry, for I carry your memory and what you could have become

I am still trying to find peace

But I was sent spiraling in mourning, wishing it was anyone but you

I know the drugs feel too good and that the emotions are a hell that is a solitary experience with just your name on the door

Surviving is something I struggle with these days

On the darkest ones I always looked to you

But now they are darker

Maybe I will feel you on my shoulder soon telling me to keep on going for you

Damage Done

They say untreated mental illness causes damage to the brain

Which means 9 years has done a toll on me

Illness surfaced first at 12 when I stopped eating

Worsening in the second year of abuse at 13 – I am sure her fists every day left a mark but time blocked that year out

Maybe flight or fight kicked in and I am running from the memories of the beginnings

Addiction took hold that same year in the form of the blood down the drain

Learning that it numbed the chaos no one else could see

Mother thought I was taking after my cousin in the form of track marks at only 13

Yet my screams fell on deaf ears until the day I was about to go home and execute myself in the last cry for help

Trying to return to the earth my family came from

Despite never seeing the homeland forests we are named after

Lungs began to blacken weeks before the hospital stay

Hallucinations plaguing in the year after

Medication is a tricky thing

And 7 is not my lucky number for 7 years later I went through with an attempt

Psychosis kicking in before I could stop it

I do not remember that night, mind automatically erasing traumatic events

And I had endured 4 years of it at this point

Loving a man whose concept of love was hurting someone else adding 2 years

Yet I have learned “endure” is carved in my bones

Passed on from my father and his siblings, his parents

From extreme poverty to a war they did not want to fight to the repercussions of service to addiction

All surviving, enduring

I am learning to mourn the years I lost

Learning from my father, I am being taught by the best qualified teacher

I am enduring the pain

Despite the decade of damage

7 Years, A Love Left

At 21 you are not suppose to die

This is the time you are blooming into adulthood

I tried plucking myself from the earth this mortal vessel is bound to at 21

Closing my eyes in a feverish delirium hoping I would not wake up

An attempt to kill the monster lurking under my skin

After my lunges failed to give out after the addiction blossomed

After my liver refused to give in

 

Seven is not my lucky number

14 was how old I was when I actually had a plan to carry out, yet being put away the same day I was planning to leave

21 was a feverish dream

The only way I can explain it is that I had left the building

The building being my brain

Looking back, it was probably psychosis brought on by a severe depressive episode

Come to learn I was misdiagnosed for 7 years

 

But the static seems to be getting louder after you walked away

My father quit smoking when my mom threatened leaving and they have been together for 30 years now

What I mean to say is that you made me want to put my addiction on the shelf

I would have quit for you – that was how much faith I had in you being the one

But now I’m trying to find the light everyone talks about

I can’t seem to find the good in goodbye

And I am so sorry I was never enough when you were everything I ever wanted in life

Control

I tried to die once

A fever breaking trying to empty a vessel that had nothing left to give

Poisoning myself in hopes my veins would forget you

Don’t get me wrong – I was not thinking about death

Only about letting go

Letting go of the emptiness and the pain

The same way my dreams left

Consumed by the inner depths of myself

I wanted to let go

Asking if this is hell – getting lost in a labyrinth of nightmares

I shattered with a few words cold as ice and spiraled out of control

Suddenly you were so far out of reach and had no where but myself to turn

I have died a thousand deaths but this was the most painful

You watching calmly while picking shards of me out of your veins with such ease

Walking away from this life was not what I wanted

I just wanted to stop time

But I lost control

To sleep

“To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation” – Hamlet

I was almost a 40 seconds

One in 11 who fails for every person who dies

Pain corroding my insides for no one else but me to see

Shattering on my floor with the dark of night as my witness

The end of the tunnel not in sight, I could not light it up myself

I wanted everything to stop

Nothing remained for me on this earth

Drowning in the depths of the Atlantic

Filling my lungs with the chilling empty this disease carries

There was no reason

I did not want to die

I just wanted the world to stop turning around me

For time to cease – for the never ending pain to leave the homes they made of my bones

I tried taking a 40 seconds to rip myself from this existence

I still cannot tell you why

An insidious disease took over that night

But not me

Sunny Stubborn

The dark days are locked in my heart

Some day I may be able to throw away the key forever

But on the good days the sun shines bright

I am grateful I wake up with the hazy morning sun grazing over my face

Almost as sleepy as I am

Grateful for the first sip of coffee to awaken my soul

Good days come crisp as the autumn wind

The bad storms at sea

Yet I refuse to drown

The women in my family are too stubborn for that shit as I am

From today I welcome the bad days as they are part of the coming and going of life

They teach me to value the bright light in the darkness – the good in the bad

I refuse to face defeat with open arms

Ode to the Woods

Kids giggling between trees, atop rocks, exploring, imagining

Parents indoctrinating the caution you need to take when you get home and check for ticks from birth

Running though swamps barefoot trying to catch that elusive frog

The woods, she knows all of my secrets

Inhaling her sweet smell with the exhale of the first tastes of nicotine

Feeling the rain on my skin while trying to forget the souls that will never meet your excellence

For they are too afraid of the bugs that the young embraced by you learn to ignore

Or they left this earth as quick as I wished to

Solitude left me planning at how you would embrace me when I executed the blueprints of my death

Imagining the moment my heart stopped beating and I would return to the depths of you

Taking the secrets only you knew with me

Returning to the place I emerged as my ancestors before me

 

Poisoned Nightmare

Opening my eyes to a clenched jaw and heart I’m sure is screaming loud enough to wake up the whole neighborhood

But the soft sunlight warms my partner’s peaceful, slumbering skin

Rib cage rising and falling in rhythm until a snore disrupts it

It was just another nightmare about your hands molding to my jaw

Convincing my tongue that the poison you were breathing in to me was sweet

Arguing the obituary you wrote for yourself sitting in your nightstand was an adequate excuse for slitting my throat too

Because then we will be together forever without your mother standing in between

My love’s leg twitching brings me back to a world I am still barely able to recognize myself in

He is teaching me how to love again

Yet many days I still feel your hands tightening around my throat

Filling my lungs with your sadness

While I was already drowning in my own

The walls are still closing in on me

You eroded me into dust and everyone keeps reminding me of the mountain I was before you – standing loud and proud

It’s been years and my voice is still the quiet whistling of the wind, not the quaking, rumbling earth I was before

His arms wrap around my waist and pulls me in closer as he’s still at peace in his untainted dreams

And I have to remind myself that it has been years

But a few short years of destruction can undo thousands of development

That’s exactly what you did to me

I hope you never make it back to me

Your dose of poison for so long has not bled itself out and I will never be ready for another