christmas eve, almost.

Words are easy, slippery, slide off the tongue like nothing, like eels, simple and deceiving and sharp, a flick of the tail, sting. You go on talking like nothing has just happened but I feel the dog’s jaws clamped tight around my throat. Can’t breathe, not for lack of trying. Not sure where these choppy waves of speech stem from; do you just not know what to say? I try to love you but you make it really hard. I cannot love myself.

When you sleep it is so easy to breathe and be calm and understand. But the variability in your awakeness, my fear, your withdrawal, my own self-loathing make it impossible for this to just be. Is it supposed to be this hard?

So I sit here awake in this hotel room and just dissect. I cannot be just some random girl. You certainly don’t behave as if I am. But your actions just don’t match up. The inconsistency keeps throwing me off-balance. Are you trying to catch me off-guard? It seems so easy to be an afterthought in your world. I don’t want to be anyone’s stop-gap, time-filler, this-minute. I may not love myself but I have enough pride to reject that.

It gets better, worse, better, worse, slowly in increments it seems like the overall feeling improves. But just as I get comfortable, it’s like I step on a sharp rock and collapse, only the sharp rock is a snake and the venom courses through me, fear fear fear fear fear and I cannot stop it. I don’t know where these barbs come from, if it’s your insensitivity or my oversensitivity but I sometimes I feel like it is going to break me. And sometimes I know it is only making me stronger.

sprout

back alive. tiny sprig of green from the blackest earth yet. so exhausted. takes all my everything to rise above this time. drowning drowning but it’s not water, its viscous tangible hate and fear and it covers everything. sticks to me like paste, slowly dripping as I try to move around the world like an actual human being. I don’t know how long this will last. I don’t know how long I will be human and alive and awake. until it uncoils itself again, slowly twisting around my innards until I cannot breathe. leaving me no choice but to surrender. lay down in oncoming traffic, let it all wash over me and consume all that’s left.

and now, here’s the list of things that will keep the dragon quiet. so easy to check off like a shopping list. tiny little things. but the very instant it starts all those tiny things become entirely inaccessible. skyscrapers, and I am an ant. this is why there is no way out.

there are limits to human capability. I wonder sometimes if I’m just not meant to fly. not meant to survive. there’s no way, from an evolutionary standpoint, that someone like me would survive. natural selection would just wipe me out, like a Neanderthal or a woolly mammoth. Nature is exact like that. unforgiving.

the only thing I know how to do is treasure this tiny bit of sunlight I have been given, and hope that when the sprout inevitably dies, I have made the roots strong enough to survive. to live another day. I lie awake and dream.