poems for the dead

The Ghost In my Skull

I don't tell anyone this, but your face leaks into my dreams more often than not.
When awake, I'm tormented constantly with the knowledge you will never feel the same as I and I might never shake this obsession.
In my sleep it continues. Most recently you appeared and like always I couldn't peel my eyes away. You didn't notice me, but the person you were with did.
They taunted me, putting truths I've known for awhile to speech.
"He will never like you, don't you know that? Can't you get it through your thick head?"
Yes, I do. If one thing above anything else is true in this world, that would be it.
Still, I follow like a stray puppy at his heels, begging for table scraps.
It is hard to swallow the fact that someone is possible of loving, and loving people like you, but just not you. You think that if you stick around maybe they'll fall too and the ache in your chest will be soothed.
It won't.
They won't.
Some say dreams can tell the future, and in my case I hope they're wrong.
I don't want to be like this forever. I don't even want to be like this right now.
I am bitter and jealous and unstable.
This stopped being love a long time ago I think, if it ever was.
Now it is mostly another reason to cry myself to sleep, to prove to myself that I am not enough.
It could be abandonment issues, self-esteem issues, mommy issues, whatever. But some damaged part of me has trouble believing that someone could ever love me honestly.
My head screams when I'm left on read, when someone has plans, when my friends are hanging out with people I don't know that are objectivelly cooler than me and dumb as fuck. People like them. Normal teens.
I am so far from normal that I don't even know where to start. What do most people my age do? Go to the mall? Smoke and drink and party? Have sex? Be upstanding students and do a bunchof community service? Go to sports games? 
I'm sure whatever it is it's far different than my daily experience. Depending on what day it is I got to school, go to work, watch tv sometimes, scroll on my phone, go to bed. It's not that I am against doing something, but there's nothing to do. Pretty much all of the time my friends are too busy to hangout and I have no clue what to do on my own, ironic because that's how most of my time is spent.
There's this unsoken knowledge everyone else seems to have about living life, interacting with people. I think I knew at one point what it was, in an instinctual way. Now though I only know that what I'm doing isn't right. 
Perhaps I'm a tortured artist, destined to be alone in his creative genius. Or some crucial part of me is broken. Maybe I'm just nuerodivergent. Maybe I am fine and convincing everyone I am inept so that they feel bad or something.
...
Maybe I am doing everything exactly right and everyone still ignores me, and leaves me, and lies to me. 
Maybe I'm too easy. I get hurt and open myself right back up again just to end up right where I started. I read things wrong and ruin friendships. I let people lie to me and wait patiently for them to throw my heart away like trash.
And what's worse is I sit bitching and whining about this shit to do nothing about it.
Someday soon I hope my dreams are filled with adventure and fun stuff and wacky subplots, and you make no appearance. You do not come and go from my head as you please like it's your home. We are friends and I'm okay with that. You are not my only friend. I have people to hangout with and keep me out of there too.
This might be hopeful thinking, but can human beings really survive without it.
It is a beacon of light at the end of the tunnel, a reason to keep going, and a point of bittersweet melancholy.
It is my voice in my head repeating, "Everything will be better eventually, this darkness can't last forever."

If I say it enough, maybe I'll believe it.