Poetic Relapse.

Holding.

I hold a hand in my mind, though the hand is unfamiliar it is warm and safe.

I see eyes in my dreams that haunt me. Cold unlike this warm hand that happily holds me in its grasp as if to protect me from these unseen features that creep through my nightmares.

I hold half a heart in my reality. 1/4 my own and 1/4 someone else's, as I have ripped my other half away so I don't have to give it away once again with the fear of having it be slowly torn from me, as if this slow tear hurts so much more than a fleeting burn that comes back everyday.

Half of myself is burned to a crisp. Licked thoroughly by a flame that refuses to extinguish itself, a fleeting memory. Half of myself has been left behind in a desperate attempt to cope with these memories that grip my skin and leave bruises that only I can see. I am the only one who can see these reoccurring bruises and scrapes and tears that line my eyes in a constant attempt to keep these memories at bay, but I seem to find myself overflowing more often than not.

These shattered pieces held together by this hand are slowly falling away, and I fear I won't have enough bits and pieces of obliteration left to hold this hand back, to let it know I am there and I feel the warm embrace it allows me. But this hand is kept in a silent box under my bed that is not allowed to make noise and I am not allowed to see who's hand it is. This hand is a ghost that haunts in the best way, unlike these eyes that crush and destroy and inch of me that feels I may best something.

Drowning has began to feel like breathing. It has become a cycle of waking up to water lining my eyes and my lungs and my heart and chest and I am no longer aware that this hand is in this little box. I often forget that this hand is there. If only I could forget these eyes instead.

But the eyes are useless when it's the mind that is blind.