You are a sunburn; you came with happy times spent in sunny days, and you left me with the coming of autumn and the bright orange leaves. So were you ever really there? Will I have any physical reminders of your love on my person? I once heard that every cell in our entire body is destroyed and replaced every seven years. So in a short seven years I will have a body that you will have never touched… and that thought is both beautiful and the saddest fucking thing I have ever heard.
Your lips bewitched me.
A glossy coat of distilled resin,
Edges tinged by the Sun,
And so my heart lingers
On a shaking yellow dream,
The same shade
As dandelion wine.
Your kiss took root,
Sinking into my veins,
A poison, like acid rain,
And it burns, burns, burns,
Until nothing remains
Save for the idling taste
Of ashes on my tongue.
It’s not like I felt 100% secure in myself before, but I didn’t feel exposed all the time. I cared about how I looked, but only to what I considered a normal degree. I spent time each morning doing my hair, making sure it looked nice, and that was that; I didn’t waste anymore time or effort. Nowadays I spend the whole day catching glimpses of myself in puddles and dirty windows, and I am never satisfied with what I see. I sit in my car before work, messing with my face, trying to manipulate my hair, eyes and general physiology into something presentable, but I never get out of my car feeling human. It’s like I’m always wearing shoes that are just a tad to tight.
It’s that feeling of opening the fridge to see what’s inside, closing it without having grabbed anything, and realizing you just checked your washing machine for food, and yes, you never even started that load of laundry, so you’ll be sleeping without sheets for the millenith time this century.
My face has no purpose, so everywhere it appears is another new nowhere. It’s not as I’m terrifyingly ugly, but I’m so out of place that I’m often mistaken for avant garde art, if an avant garde artist was on meth, and wasn’t really an artist at all but just some drug addicted 20 something sharing her “art” with her 97 Instagram followers, 8 of which are accounts she made to try and inflate her online persona.
I’m confusing to the public, regardless of the time, place, or lens through which I am viewed. Smartphone cameras consider my face as a smudge, so at least I can avoid being tagged in pictures posted to social media. But if you don’t exist on Facebook, are you even real? Without my opinions being expressed via Tweets and hashtags, I might as well not have opinions at all! My existence is a lie! Maybe I’m just the first of a new breed of modern ghosts. Maybe, if I spend another 5 years avoiding things like the Sun and any situation that has me interacting with another human being, I’ll finally just become a transparent blob. Perhaps, in that someday 5 years away, people who cast their gaze across the dotted lines of the early morning expressway will experience various levels of awe as they marvel at the modern wonder that is a driverless 2013 Honda Civic. Perhaps those people will even spare a thought as to why anybody would spend the money to retrofit such a vehicle to be self-driving, and perhaps even a few of those people will see the faint outline of my bulging form behind the wheel and realize this isn’t a technological wonder; it’s just a really pale and depressed fat human ragdoll.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself.
Or maybe I just don’t give a fuck about my life.
But honestly? I hate myself, and I believe I deserve to feel this way.
Another day, another bottle’s contents swirling in my stomach, melting away the anxiety and replacing it with a physical sensation akin to choking. Or perhaps my throat is actually swollen shut? My lungs might be filling up with cheap liquor and cigarette smoke, leaving no room for something as silly as a chemical reaction turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. Perhaps that’s for the best, letting my words die in my chest before they find purchase on my breath, saving me from making another mistake, since I’m sure I’d just waste my final moments trying to tell you something, even though there’s not a single fucking thing you want to here from me…
There is no happiness in the world, just a series of paths that grow progressively darker as more time passes. In the end, it culminates into something so black, you can’t see anything moving forward, and you can’t see anything when you look back, so your left choking on empty memories, and in that dark womb you’ll wonder if anything has ever happened to you that would have made life worth experiencing this cruel, crushing, relentless weight… And even at the end, when I have nothing left but pain and regret, I close my eyes and somehow catch a glimpse of who I used to be. It’s only a reflection, but it’s real, and I know that at some point in my life I was able to smile…but this is a reflection, so I can’t ignore the eyes in which I see the reflection… At the end of all things, where I’m alone in a universe that doesn’t care, I can’t go to sleep without seeing your face…and it hurts…it hurts so goddamn much…
I can’t resist the urge to break. It’s almost like a need, a physical itch that demands I scratch it with a freshly sharpened pocket knife.
I hate this feeling.
I am filled up with things and stuff instead of love and warmth, and it hurts. I want to cry. Every day I want to do nothing else but cry. I scream at myself in the car until the stares from strangers drives me into a deep enough shame that I choke on my stupidity. I want to be numb, so I take these pills. I want to forget, so I do these drugs. I want to erase myself from this world, so I spend as much time as I can on my own. I want to die, so I research methods of suicide and write notes for the police, my parents, and everyone else. I want to suffer, so I make sure God can do nothing but hate me. I want…I want out of this cycle…I want to live and smile and have hope…I want to not eat until I’m sick, throwing up in the bathroom, returning from every meal with a fever…I want to stop being so lazy and tired, to find the motivation to move my stupid body, to make it react, to force it awake…I want to find love for myself, any reason to love me at all…I want to do something with the love others have given me aside from ripping it up in front of their faces…I want to be proud, to make others proud of me…I want to exist without wishing I didn’t exist…I want to exist without thinking I have to suffer for my existence…I want that, all of that…but I did it again. In the time between my millionth plan to become a better person and lunch, I’ve tossed it all away again…again and again and again…all that planning, the time and energy and effort, and all of it wasted again…once again I did nothing…once again I managed to find a new low…again and again and again…I don’t want anymore, never again…I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want to die…and I don’t want to live…so what can I do?
What can a loser like me do…
I’ve spent the past 6 years trying to erase everything.
If our lives are homes that grow with time, than what I have been doing is leaving the front door unlocked, every window open, and I couldn’t even wait for the world to rip out anything of value, so I actively participated in the pillaging, until nothing of value remained.
I’m an empty house, stripped bare from 6 years of trying to erase whatever we shared, and I shared it all, so it all came down.
20 years of life that I remember, and each memory has now be drowned, and it only took 6 years to destroy whatever I used to be, so the work is done…right?
Yes, that must be right…but if that’s true…
~Why am I still breathing?~
