She comes when I want her to go,
Like a guest staying till one am on a school night,
When my bed calls my name,
But instead I am forced to use my tired legs.
When I wake up she comes slowly at first,
But as my reflection comes into focus so does she,
So interwoven in a knot inside of me that if I untangle her,
The whole thing will fall apart.
She is the tightness in my chest,
The threads pulling my face in ways I try not to express,
The lump that grows in the back of my throat and one day,
Everest might have some competition,
She is my dog when he gets loose,
And no bribe brings her back to settle down.
She has become a part of my soul so wrapped and entangled that if I were a tree trunk,
She would be the inner rings,
If I were a bird she would be the feathers to my wings and the notes that I sing,
If I was a flower she would be my prettiest petal,
If I were an apple she would be all of my seeds,
I hate her, I want to break her and shatter her into thousands of pieces,
Chuck something into the mirror even if its bad luck,
And scream at her why she is always there staring through me like I’m see through,
And why she can never leave.
She is my motivation to succeed, to obtain sums of money,
And the basis of my greed,
But when she makes me rich in my mansion,
It will all have been so we can sit alone,
Across from one another,
As she drinks the cocktails that I bought for her.
She will never be satisfied,
Always whispering in my ear to climb every single mountain,
And only when there’s none left to climb will I know I’ve peaked,
Singing lullabies that are supposed to lull me to sleep,
And if I kill her, her blood will drain out of me,
And wet the ground the color of the wine we drank last week,
She’ll look down from the heavens asking if I’m where I want to be,
I want her to leave.
She is so alone that she clings to me like a newborn crying for milk,
She is any silence I suffered as a child shaped by my teachers and molded by my peers,
By any lonely summer I experienced terrified of ever repeating those days where,
The sun shined bright but I felt it was mocking me,
She is the clingy friend I used to be,
The adult whose baby face never quite wore off.
She is the only child unable to afford, lemonade, from the corner store,
The fifty year old man ashamed he cheated on his wife with a woman half her age,
The hit song that was never played,
She is the child who never got to meet their father,
The mother who had to abort her daughter,
And the artist whose work would have been okay,
If their creativity had not been crushed at a young age,
Or the man who went to prison because all he could afford was a crappy lawyer to defend his
case,
She is all of this summed, chopped up and arranged in a pretty pink flower bouquet.
She is the person who claps offbeat at the concert,
But keeps trying anyways,
And the smartest person I’ve never seen,
I only realized I knew her, like last week!
This is a reminder to just breathe,
Just breathe,
Just breathe,
Just,
Breathe.
