I feel sick most days

Like my stomach insists on running

Like my lungs want to give up

Like my brain has a hammer

I feel sad most days

Like my arms are too heavy to lift

Like my bed doesn't want me to leave

Like my eyes don't want to open

I feel cold most days

Like my eyes are steel

Like my heart is closed up

Like my love isn't worth it

I feel overwhelmed

Like it's time to give up

Like I should do something easier

Like my bullies were right

Most is not all

But it feels that way

Like it's all consuming

Like there's no more sun behind the clouds 

Like the beauty of the moon,

My love for you cannot be captured by a camera

It is meant for oil paintings and poetry

Not a pixilated screen

My love isn't meant for modern art

So I write it on paper, in ink

With hope that it will outlast my fading mind

The beauty of the moon is eternal

If women were made from the rib of man, I will rip out every rib, one by one, with my own two hands until I am something else entirely. Through the pain and the blood and the impracticality of it all, I will remove the very thing that connects me to a concept I have no desire for. I will devour my own humanity if it means that I will not be bound by the standards that have been imposed upon me by arbitrary and misconstrued words. Even when the blood drips from my hand in waves of horror and I have disarticulated my body in an attempt to recreate myself. Even when my hands can no longer stitch my wounds back together and my head is too heavy to lift. I will be a divine being in my own right. A grotesque image of depravity and desperation.

I am not a holy creature, but still some say that I need saving by a force that even they cannot see or speak to. There is no tangible truth to their belief, but I am the proof of my own. My bones are all broken to bits from being forced into the narrow spaces that self-proclaimed “Righteous” individuals think I should be in. If I have to contort myself to fit their image, I will do so in a way that makes me even more disgusting and disfigured than I am already perceived. I will hover on the brink of being a social pariah, rearranging every essential part of my human form.

I'd rather be ugly and mutilated but happy with myself than sitting pretty and mentally unwell.

When a person disappears, or leaves for a while, what do you do when they eventually come back? Do you fill them in on everything they may have missed? Do you try to ask them why they left in the first place? Then, there's also the situation where the person that disappeared does this kind of thing all the time and expects to come back without any consequence.

In that case, how long is too long? Days, Weeks, Months, Years? Does it affect how you view them when you see them again and they act as if they had never been gone? Would it hurt more if they were apologetic and wanted to know what had happened in your life while they ignored it?

What do you do if you never see them again? Were you the problem? Did something happen to make them runaway? There is grief in a loss, there is grief in reunion, and grief in the questions you have to ask yourself. Disappearance is not simple; there are too many variables to think about, so some simply don't.

This type of grief doesn't disappear.

I am a very realistic person. I don't dream too big, and I don't fear the worst. I am in-between in every aspect of my life. I am too young to think the way I do, and too old to change it now. I am too smart to struggle as much as I do, but not smart enough to know how to fix it. I feel as though I am stuck in a loop of constant inadequacy. Always just sat on the edge of something I cant quite touch. Its a rather melancholy feeling, to be stuck in a spot like mine. When me and my siblings drew our lots, just as I am the middle child, I am absolute center in everything I do. I was the middle of my graduating class. I was the in the mid-range of ability in my section of band.

I don't mind the way I am. I can fly under the radar and I manage to get through almost everything. Sometimes, it just seems like being so unremarkable is a curse rather than a blessing.

3 things a day

3 mundane, normal things

"Positives," he calls them

"Write and reflect"

Find the calm in the chaos

3 things that don't make you want to scream

"It's easy," he says

"Put them in a book and forget"

3 things a day

3 seemingly repetitive moments

"Just try," he pleads

So I do

3 things a day

In a yellow spiralbound notebook

Pretty sentences that mean nothing

Yet, I feel better after

3 things a day

3 things that seem so simple in the moment

"I told you," he says

"Just three things"

3 things a day

3 seconds each

Moments that feel weightless

Ones that give me peace

My happy place is an old Victorian house. on the back of that house is a bench, and that bench faces the forest. When you sit on that bench and stare into those trees, you know that something is there. Something older than the stained glass windows of the house, something older than the books on the shelves or the wine in the cellar. Something so old that it breathes in time with the trees. The longer you sit and try to rationalize the presence, your mind starts to play tricks on you. You think to yourself, "Maybe its just the wind, or a bear." But when you really focus, you know that the something you know is there isn't describable with the words in our vocabulary. That something has always been there, and knows all pain and all happiness, and you know that you aren't alone. Sure, that thought alone is enough to unsettle most people, but that's what makes this place so happy for me. The fact that you something is watching you back, thinking the same things about you.

Some people tell me that I have a rather sick sense of humor, and that I make normal things seem much more depressing than they are. It’s not really my fault, though. Every modern thing we have and know of has a tragic back story. There is little beauty in the mundane things that people do or that we have, whether it be our own sense of joy, or the act of sweeping our floors. There is beauty in the tragedy of life. The desperate grab for good things to happen to us, and trying to avoid death, though it is impossible. We do not strive for simplicity. We strive for the extraordinary, even if the extraordinary things are the ones that lead to the mundane practices. To understand ourselves is to understand the series of misfortunes and mishaps that lead to our creation. There is no fault in finding the humor hidden behind the clouds that blind us.

Misconstructed from leftover, faulty pieces

Discontinued cogs and gears to make up my being

Left in a warehouse to grind myself into dust

Singing slowly, I work myself to insanity

Mechanical clanging is the sound of my heart still beating

Wires exposed to the elements year after year

Becoming more and more frayed, the wood decaying

While rust grows on my body

I work continuously, though I know it's for nothing

Waiting for the day when the people come back again

When the air is filled with the sounds of laughter

Sunbeams on my face while I watch life stop

Something so bittersweet hangs in the air

As the gears turn, but the world does not