into the forest i go | a collection of poetry

☆Dear Red Box Under My Bed☆

(TW: SH)

I despise you for your color
You're red, like what you made me do to myself
Hidden under my bed
I filled you with "anti-numb stuff"
Locked you up and threw away the key

You're red like the permanent red mark on my cheek
The mark I was given at birth and have carried with me
You're as red as the red on my hands from squeezing too tightly in the heights of my overbearing pressure
You're red as if my pain could be diagnosed by an expert

I used to be a nice shade of blue
A blue I had become used to
A blue that wasn't so hard to look at in the mirror
A blue distinctive and clear as the sky
A blue I could handle
A blue I didn't have to rely on
Blue like a shoulder I could cry on
A blue that would sometimes turn to green and give me the freedom to be any color I wanted to be

You made me crimson red
On my cycle, I bled from two places
Cut the petals from my lotus and all of the leaves too
I wrote pages and pages upon my skin
Every aching pain, just waiting to be written

You were the monster under my bed
That little me never believed in
But your story tends to go unsaid
You're scarier than any monster I could ever imagine
I unlocked you with ease, because you were the key to me
The key to feeling

I was never truly free in your grasp though
Drowning in a dark forest
Sinking into the soil
No one could find me
I was a missing person

I bled out every thought
Letting my cuts scab over, then peeling them away
Depriving me of the healing that I so deeply needed
Self-sabotage, always feeling defeated

My child weeps
She looks at the scarred mutilations
Red lines, thick vines covering my home
Killing off all of the florals that had grown
She wonders how it all happened
What was life like before you came into mine?
Who was I, red box in disguise?

You became a secret
You became guilt
You became all of the shame I've ever felt wrapped in a fancy little bow
You became my lifeline
Like oxygen is a drug
You taught me more things to hate about myself
More than I ever knew I could

Dear red box under my bed
You will never leave my head
You don't really come around anymore
Knocking on the door
Slowly possessing my body, you tread

You're a whisper in the wind
You're a dangling thread
You always unravel me much farther than I intend
But by the grace of the continuing of all things
Just as the movement of the world will never end
I continue to spin anew again and again