You come up to me and yell and scream and tear me down telling me that I'm not trying hard enough. That I'm not trying to study or that I'm not trying to contain all these emotions that are spilling out and dripping like wax from a candle. But, I'm trying. Every single atom in my body is on fire trying to process everything that is going on. My throat is burning as I gag again and again because my digestive system just isn't working. Food makes me gag, thinking about talking to you makes me gag, thinking about gagging makes me gag and now I can't breathe. There is this simultaneous blasting noise that makes me flinch and the graveyard quiet that makes me stop and cry. Where do the rules I have to follow come into play if I spend almost all the time spent awake trying to breathe? In. Out. In. Out. Suddenly it is not going in anymore and I'm by myself again. My peripheral vision is blacking out and I feel the weight of nothing crushing me and I have to get out of the land of sorrow but how do you run from something that keeps following you? Suddenly I'm a kid again trying to run from the moon but it keeps running with me. I stop and it stops. The stars do nothing to dim the moon; pale, dark and covered with craters. Sometimes it goes away or seems to go away but it is always there. Looming over the edge of the cliff baiting me like a mouse to cheese and suddenly I'm hanging by my fingertips over an endless chasm. When push comes to shove I don't know if I can handle it or even pretend to handle it. Keeping it all together like a pillow filled with feathers didn't work so I let it out. Ripping open everything that covered me and suddenly I'm everywhere and now people can see through the thin layer of cover that had hidden all of my feathers keeping it tucked away and safe. Now I'm everywhere and nowhere at the same time; flying and caged. Alive and dead; laughing and crying, listening to the noise and silence; the loud and the eerie. And like dried up leaves crumple, broken and used up, I ask the moon if it still thought a fallen flower was beautiful after it has been trampled on. Through the cracks of the stone on top of the highest mountain I spill and drip onto the pile of hopes and dreams dissolving all of that sweetness and sugar with my tears and blood.
