Peroxide (Peterick)

I hate everything, including myself

I kissed Pete fucking Wentz, and my mind is hell-bent on making sure I am cognizant of that, igniting every crisp document of prudence with a black fire screaming inside me.

But what my mind doesn't know is that with something like this, you can suppress it. Whatever. You can shove it deeper into the closet, as if you haven't been doing it for years already, and you can allow yourself to forget.

But you never do, so you keep coming back and find the coffin you buried, the coffin that isn't able to be opened anymore, but you nevertheless retain the persistent urge to know what's been hiding inside, so your fingers crack from your effort to pry the lid off, and in the unlikely event that you actually succeed, it's as empty as the void in your soul.

So basically, we're all screwed in one way or another. The people who remember are haunted, while the people who forget are constantly itching for more.

I've understood that method forever, yet I'm still confined within my arms to a bathroom stall whose lighting plays peek-a-boo intermittently and dangles mania in front of me like a string to a cat, and therefore my anxiety is everlasting.

My hydrogen peroxide isn't capable of being stored inside my pockets, and my obsessions are as dynamic as ever, so a damp paper towel will have to suffice. It's not the real product, though, so my vision is attracted to everything else in the room while it rots.

Subdued voices nurse the patrons' ears, some opting for a slurred pedagogy, some consummately sober, all far too shrill for my fondness, but it's similar to engaging in a conversation — at least for me, because psychologists claim my conversations are often unrequited.

Shoes waddle in a muffled exhalation, circling the room so that they're invariably visible below the plastic walls as they complete the task they entered this place to do, somehow mocking me for lingering in here with tears mauling the floor in prolonged intervals of five seconds.

And it becomes a game I play as I wait for my emotions to be flushed out in the form of deoxyribonucleic saltwater, wide eyes chasing the pellets of my own production as they languish in the smooth tile and mimic my prior death.

Unlike me, however, they behave with indomitable grace, plunging their arms into elegant twirls and bows, and they transform death into a work of theater. They make dying look beautiful, even when it is not, and it converts suicide to my taste, dipping me over the edge of a cliff with a smile kindling my lips, because it's my desire transfused in someone else's actions, and I'm finally earning my wish.

Death is a perplexing concept, and though I jokingly shame Gerard for feeling the same thing, the captivation often sojourns in me, too. Every time my eyelids eclipse my curious pupils, visions of graves and falcons and awe sashay through my trail, but they never fracture my bones, never paint my shadow with blood.

Rather, they transport layers of crystal streams to my aching figure and soothe my brittle heart with tender fingers contrived from silhouettes just as fearful as I am, and they cherish the fact that I'm fucking alive, because like me, they are bloody, bruised, and broken by the voice in my head that orders flames to lick their flesh until they're as dry as skin washed in hydrogen peroxide, and they have battled by my side since their birth out of fallen leaves — a birth that sentenced the visions to death but didn't, for they were cunning enough to diagnose the sound of swords being unsheathed and ran for their fucking lives.

But alas — where have they gone now that my tears represent the leaves from which they sprang? Perhaps once they saw the DNA soaring from my eyes, they decided it was time for them to do the same, so they split away in a lurid fragment and obliterated their own leaves. Now when I close my eyes, all I see is a sneer and a vacant road, and it's like befriending the kind of death that's disagreeable to the optimists.