crestfallen / a collection of poetry

mourn

there's this little hole inside of my chest
I've tried and succeeded in filling it up myself
but sometimes it splits open, and pouring out come my biggest demons
the ones that become the nagging voice in the back of your head, the ones that remind me what a failure my life can be seen to be.
what did I do the first sixteen years of my life?
I was miserable.

something I wish I experienced was a big bonfire
it's always the first thing I think of when I think about the loneliness I felt
I think about the beach and the way I wish I visited it more
I think about how I've only recently started to enjoy swimming on my own
that makes me think about how I stopped swimming in the ocean because my parents never wanted to go in with me
did I ever swim in the ocean with others? rarely
I think about the diary entry when I was 12 that asks if life will ever get better
and I think about how it has, so much. but it also makes me so, so sad.

a little girl of barely 12 bore the weight of the world on her shoulders
I remember the first time I looked in the mirror and hated my body was when I was 13 and it was because I liked a boy, how that feeling never really left. how it's still there. how I don't talk to that boy anymore and I still don't know why.

how I've been left without closure so many times I feel like I've left a thousand of my ghosts sitting in cafes all over the world. the version of me that is still writing on her laptop behind the bar with a sprite with ice beside me. the version of me that is playing habbo hotel or sims in a corner of that one restaurant. the version of me that is passing a notebook back and forth with a friend, writing stories about boys I will never meet. I think about all these versions of myself and I mourn them — I mourn how I was never able to experience the things I wrote about, the things I still so very deeply crave—the bonfires and the swimming in the ocean and the hair braiding and the shopping and the late night sleepovers. Sometimes I had something like it, but it was always fleeting and never a constant thing in my life.