Do you know what it is like to become a knife in your own back? To become the eruption of atoms in your vertebrae, tearing apart the foundations of your home?

No. No, you do not, and I surely hope you never will.

Please. Understand.

Broken does not mean beautiful. 'Fragile' and 'lovely' are not synonyms.

I am an unpaved road. I am serrated. I am everything there is but lovely.

I am the half-empty glass. I am also half-full.

I am everything. I am nothing.

I am the undoing of all things, and the restoration of one. 

Broken glass. Sharp blade. Disappearing act.

Staying in one place has never been easy. I need to uproot and feel the pain of leaving. Pain is mandatory. Without agony, feeling is impossible.

Impossible. Irreconcilable. Unimaginable.

Can you not see that I am trying the be the kinder party? I am trying to love deeper and forgive easier, but please understand how hard it is when each step toward them twists the knife further and deeper.

Why is it that I am always the effort that they receive? Don't you understand that I break too?

I ask for you to see that, but I realise it is too much to ask. Everything I ask is too much, because I am the effort that other people believe they have the right to receive.

That doesn't make sense.

I know.

My poems have become messy. This is me, cutting myself open, and allowing myself to bleed out onto the page. 

You will never understand. I will never understand. Accept it.

I do not write for you. Or for me. 

I write because, to not write would be to give up completely. And that is not an option.

I sit here, in filtered sunlight like a dying fern that should be thriving. I do not fit in. I die in places I should thrive. I do not thrive. I die. But I survive, and that is all that matters.

I wander past the slumbering giants, trying not to wake them, but failing every time. And they chase me. I do not know why. But I run.

I run from the encroaching darkness, from the giants, from the monsters. Should I be running? Maybe I should stop to see what they want. Maybe I should answer the knock at the door. Maybe I should let them in.

I am young. But I am tired like my whole life is already behind me. Is it wrong to be this young and this tired? Am I somehow defying nature's laws? 

I am a house, collapsing from disregard. 

Forgotten. Abandoned. Broken.

"Till death do us part." The words I uttered when life was first breathed into my bones. And yet, despite my heartfelt promise at such an age, I broke my vow. I left myself to die a long time ago. And yet I still survive. 

My body is resolute in its desire to live.

My mind is determined in its decision to die.

So tell me: how am I supposed to go on like this, with body and mind at war?

I'm just hitting my fists against a mirror. But I cannot help it. These screams have been burning inside me for longer than I can remember.

But I can't let them out. It would make people uncomfortable. So, of course, I have to keep quiet, and let it destroy me instead.

No one would listen anyway.

I am shattered.

I am bleeding.

I am a broken window on a September night, letting in the cold.

I am wild.

I am trapped.

I am a cloudy night sky, hiding all my secrets.

I am lost.

I am drowning.

I am the question always left unanswered.

 Do you think he noticed? The difference between 'goodbye' and 'see you soon'? I don't think so.

I doubt he noticed how I held him for just a second longer, and the lingering of my voice on those three words. I don't think he saw the sadness in my eyes as they trailed after him. 

I'm so sorry, my love. I'm sorry you won't know the difference. I'm sorry I can't tell you. But please, understand. Leaving is not easy. 

Sometimes, things just feel off.

Like I have come home to myself after a long absence

and all my insides have been moved five inches to the left.