forgetting once and for all

It’s in these genres of nights that I become most like you: cold, distant, and suddenly so disconnected for all of the light that I had absorbed, eaten like a fallen star, all of my precautions and planning lain to waste, a landfill of light that I miss use. You, who has become an ever present, an omnipresent, presence in the darkness of my mind, a hinting fog. Consuming, smog in the city. I cannot breath. Thinking? I am like you, I don’t think. I only work on action, action and instinct. Lonely I stand, waiting for your command to tell me how to treat myself. Unfortunately, we both hate me. It doesn’t seem to get any better.
Disconnected for the world as it is, the world as I like to see it. What if the same red I saw appeared as purple in your eyes, but was simply named red? For we learned colors through pointing. That is also how we learned hatred: pointing fingers.
Have I been caught red handed in your sight? Or am I just painted red in the sins you have held over my head until they cried out in pain, dripping tears of blood onto me as a sacrificial preparation.

And then I find myself back in this place. And it feels like home. This feeling as if I have a vortex for a heart and a smoking candle for a soul.
Is this home?
Or am I really just homeless? Heartless? Soulless?

It’s not that I thought it was right. I just didn’t think it was wrong. It became a possibility in a world where it shouldn’t have been plausible.

Why? That’s always the first question they ask, the first thing they mutter, attempting to envelope you into their socially compatible magazines, television shows, and news stories. Any option entitles you to failures, screw ups, and scrutiny from all of your peers.
They ask, and you don’t have an answer. You do, because you’ve asked yourself. You’ve searched, pleaded, but never really understood, and the answer “Because I had to.” doesn’t satisfy.
Addicted kind of captures the sensation, but it doesn’t. It never felt like an addiction, but a choice that was made through conscious and planned strategies. Addiction? No. Problem? No. Solution? Sometimes, yes.
Why? I’m not sure. Is anyone sure?
Why are you asking? Curiosity? Addiction?

Her face became distorted as she absorbed my words. Her face changed all different colors and flavors as I continued on, not caring about her feelings. I lonely focused on the weight that started to diminish from my shoulders, the one that was giving me a hunch back and calling Disney to write an animated musical about me.
“But, Claire, you don’t understand the relief and the way it just took everything away, for that single moment, I became nothing but it. There were no problems, no sadness, no pressures, no expectations, only it and me. Well not even me. There was only it.”
She sneered back at my words, a look of disbelief finally settled on that chameleon face of hers. She was in shock, in denial, in disgust. She had not touched the tea or snacks that I had made and laid out for the two of us to have at this “non-confrontational” meeting.
I couldn’t keep watching her not believe me, to transform me into something cryptic, something that needed fixing. I snapped, yelling as if that would help get my point across, “It was the only thing I had all this time!”
And by the betrayal that colored her features, I realized that she would never understand why I did it, not in one thousand years. She stood up from her chair, leaning over the table, sprinkling the tea with her salty tears.
“Joan,” She spoke in a harsh whisper, threatening, repremanding, hurt, “I was always there for you.” She grabbed her purse from the posts of her chair, beginning to walk towards the front door, leaving me. Again. “You just didn’t look for my help, because you never wanted help in the first place.”
And with that the front door slammed shut and a picture on the fireplace mantle shook and fell to the floor. The family portrait from six years ago before I started all of this. I started all of this. But I feel that someone else should take equal responsibility for pushing me there.

eyes flickered an instant beyond natural.
glistening emotions radiated in those eyes
catching the suns rays,
portraying them to the world.
fear.
like ice to a rose,
like flood to a town,
like starvation to any living thing,
fear fractured in those eyes.
a fear of society, no doubt.
Why would you want to be so different?
Darwin:
those different either have a greater or a lesser chance of surviving.
you always thought lesser.
Society would mark you,
a scarlet letter,
cursed be your name,
and damnation upon those unfearing that do speak it.
Why would you want a child with such flaws.
wondering why you didn’t drown it as a baby?
easy then,
dishonor now.
Mistake. Mistake.
That’s why you’re righting what’s wrong.
Not for your child’s sake,
but for the sake of your name and the fear of society.

better or worse,
nothing in between.
like yin and yang.
nothing in between.
there is no accomplishment,
cement hardens beneath your feet:
use a pick axe or your own finger nails to pry away,
whichever bleeds fastest
is the way that turns people’s gazes
and society’s mocking attention.
media’s stories of remorse and death,
and only flowers provide true happiness,
but they don’t grow in cement.
Especially not from under your feet.
Soon you’ll turn to cement too
and be honored as an incredible piece of art,
nothing more,
and you wont try to break free of this confinement,
because from some reason you think it is better
to at least be admired that to be yourself.

It’s not the words that people say that affect us; it’s the point in time where we start to repeat those words to ourselves, that we become something we’re not.

vulnerability has gotten drunk off of the wine of my tears, purple, disintegration, fermentation so thick it doesn’t even resemble the taste of wine just the remains of life.
abandonment has measured my heart and embedded itself inside, a tape worm that consumes trust, forgotten beats subconsciously feed the monster.
guilt has mistaken me for the dead, and it stretched it’s rubber gloves on and cut me open, removing organs, selling them, superficially examining the cause of my death.
agony has burglarized my home, taking more than my possessions, my safety, comfort, and self confidence were crumpled into that bag as well, slug over the shoulder nonchalantly take for frugal money.

you have sent all of these like your minions. i hope you like what they have brought back to you in prospect. happiness wont come to you by taking mine. together our body heat will help heat hell a little.

And then I realize your innocent joke was me. It was me. Unintentionally, it was me.
The poster child: me. Secretly, never showing my face, for the shame in my eyes would label me as a traitor to the organization.
Shame of committing my acts. Never. Shame for people knowing, labeling, joking. Undeniable amounts accumulating like the water in the bath tub, mixed with evanescening bubbles, vomit, and blood.
I’m rotting away in my filth.
I’m rotting away in my body.

I can’t occupy the same space as you. I feel so small compared to your big heart and big mouth.
Your eyes capture me (whether in burning bars of rage or warm arms) enclosing me. I feel suffocated, trapped, claustrophobic. I hate closed spaces, because I’m afraid you’ll see the cracks in my own structure, or feel the dried glue cemented to my fingertips.
You care, and sometimes I thought that was the only thing that I wanted, but all I really wanted was to keep acting (You stole that dream of a career from me before I could even hope), but you couldn’t stop me. I still became an actress, practiced so much I don’t know what isn’t a script anymore.
I hate that damned script though, carved away in my walls with knives of hatred and pain, drenched in blood as the chains dug deeper, but they still demanded me to reach the same wall, to still scribe away words of wisdom and kindness when this face twitched to prevent detection of this pain.
But the chains were so much shorter and I had to dig them into my arms and wrists to reach, struggling with every breath. Every word, every glance, and I could hear the chains jiggle as they were pulled tighter.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have the miracle of reaching the wall everyday. I wish that one day I wouldn’t reach it and write words with no reflection, vampiric words, echoless, meaningless words.
How much tighter can these chains get?

Her hands trembled incoherently, shaking so terribly that even though she held onto the mug with all of her might, it slipped through those fragile fingers, cascading pieces all around her toes. She stumbled back in shock, those shaking legs unable to hold her up either as she cascaded to the ground like the mug. Shaking, unable to feel the pieces of tea and porcelain embed into her skin.

I reached out wanted to hold her, stop her, embrace her, take away all of the pain that forced her to the ground. All of the self hate that forced all of those cuts on her thighs exposed from ridding up shorts.

But this glass was too thick for her or anyone else to hear my screams, and too thick to break to grab the phone to call for her help. I was too late. I was too far away to stop the blood, to stop the binges, to stop the guilt, to stop the hate, to stop the misunderstanding, to stop it all.

I was gone, and I had forced her here. The guilt ate her up, because she never found the note that I left, soaked with my blood covered by my limp fingers, words drenched in scarlet. illegible.

It wasn’t you. Your son didn’t do this because of you. It was because he wasn’t good enough for you, or for anyone. He doesn’t want you here. I don’t want you here.

I want to drink bottles upon bottles of wine so I can’t see straight. I want to pop pills by dozen handfuls so I can’t remember my name. I want to disappear into a dream land where I don’t understand reality, because sometimes it’s better not to be myself.

there are a million reasons, yet there are none.

I wonder how many times I’ve imagined allowing you to hold me as I lay in your arms, a tempest raging within. Tears like demented waves crashing upon the sandy beaches of my cheeks, screaming and pleading with you as if you were The Fates.
“Why couldn’t you let me fly away?”
I would pound your chest with closed fists, not willing to open to except your hand. I would blame you, for closing these fists when they weighed how many sleeping pills it would take to bring me to the land of dreams and make-believe.