Anxiety unfolded its presence in my life slowly, waiting for me to catch on and give it a name. Throughout my childhood, it creeped as an octopus does across the ocean floor, stretching its tentacles and changing its color to blend in with my surroundings. By the time of adolescence, all eight tentacles wrapped around my mind. Every time I managed to free myself of one, another grew back in its place.

Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of my life obsessed with the idea of love, or, rather, the idea that I will love myself if a man loves me. I thought, wrongly, that finding a man was the only thing that mattered. Once I could do that, the rest of my life would fall into place; I would be happy.

Eventually, even the kind gestures will become / a burden: one more thank you card to write, / an hour to pretend you care about anything / other than the mountains and valleys of vitals / scrolling across the screen.

Don’t you see—there are dances left on my dance card, / minutes and days, months and years / to love hard and kiss my babies, / see them stand under the wedding canopy / and enough time to do some good in this crazy world.

i’ll see the disgust on your face once more / when all of my insecurities come to surface / when i try too hard to prove my worth to you / when my sentences are trite and childish 

There were no electric fences or steel gates locking us in. No alarm system. There was nowhere to go. The idea of running away was ridiculous. The purveyors of these institutions do this on purpose. Their “therapeutic” boarding schools are built far away from anywhere to run to, one more reminder that your life is entirely under their control.

I’ll be him when I come back, not even looking up as I walk back into his house and back up to his son. I’ll be him, not hearing the screams that night. I’ll open my eyes and wonder. Do I haunt his dreams? Does he hear me? See me?

He, the one who betrayed me, is not smiling.
He merely has that same, blank stare.
With no smile at all.

even then the food seemed to glare at me
but I’d reluctantly swallow
what tasted like shame and sawdust

Into stone they turn and she is surrounded
by reminders and the self-pity compounded

Why do all the lively conversations in the restaurant seem to disappear when I see a man gently touch his wife’s back to guide her out of the restaurant? 

Before we met, I’d play my guitar on the street for spare change, but Tom made things easy. Every night, he came home with a bottle of tequila and a case of beer. My guitar sat in the corner of his bedroom, collecting dust.

My uncle made me think about the fact that many of us are walking around with unhealed wounds, things we don’t talk about, things we let eat away at us, things we let simmer and fester and never boil over. How we sometimes hold stuff in until it destroys us. 

never have i ever driven by your house at 2 a.m. drunk and high hoping you’d catch me, and i certainly never called you drunk wanting you to sing me a lullaby.

at dawn, the sky goes coral, / like your lips, / and i wanna kiss / kiss kiss / it purple again.

We fell apart in this life and the last.
We fell apart in every life before this one
that we almost shared together.

But I am a weak little traitor for them
I make a sacrifice
Of my identity, of my comfort, of my earned self

There is the mattress where my heart broke, each spring weighed down with the memories of a girl with nothing left to give, asking a boy with nothing left to take how to make him stay.

But rage is a volatile cocktail.  Unlike its alcoholic counterpart, rage leaves no bread-crumb trail of escalating inebriation, no spiking arc of getting snockered—no warning, in other words, to hide or get out of the way.  It erupts in a split-second, an adrenaline shot that screams and smashes things, big wide swathes of arms swinging in anger, connecting often. 

i wonder what his liver looks like
under a microscope
i hope i never find out