poems for the ones who are just like me

the banana peel

You know when someone says something 'wrong' and you know the correct answer but you choose not to explain? I wonder how many times I choose not to explain...

When your favorite author suddenly dies in a car accident and you rhetorically ask, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" I think to myself, "Things happen to people."

Or when someone asks, "Lauren, why did you make plans if you really didn't want to do that?" Its not that I didn't want to do that, it's just that I REALLY didn't want to do that. I feel like I should want to do that, doesn't everyone want to do that? Or are you all thinking what I'm thinking?

But when someone asks, "Lauren, why did you put me through this?" It's not that I choose not to explain, I'm just confused whom you are talking too. I asked myself that same question 5 minutes before you did and also 5 minutes after.

It's sort of like a guessing game, you see? No not 20 questions, but more like hang-man. It's the only game I know that winning, means you're left incomplete. You guess until you bleed the last line. It's kinda like when you guess a vowel and you're so sure that it's going to be in the word, only to find out it's not.

It's when you run out of guesses of what just might be wrong with you, that you had 3 more letters to fill in, but you are one arm away from dying. It's the moment, you are dying, the moment where it is too late. It takes a pen to draw a line and a blade to tear flesh, to finally understand what is wrong with you.

Have you ever come across 2 questions that have the same answer?

Anxiety

"Lauren why did you put me through this? Lauren what is wrong with you?"

Answering these questions feels a lot like running a marathon, competing with ignorance, only every time your foot touches the ground; you slip on a banana peel.

See? No matter how close you are, you are only one banana peel away from fucking it all up.

Lauren, why did you put me through this? Cross-out Lauren, write anxiety. Maybe it wasn't me. Maybe it was the banana peel. Lauren got you flowers to apologize but anxiety was worried they were the ones you like least, so she dug a hole in her back yard kinda like the size for a man. You know the man who hangs? The hangman. She buried him with the flowers.

Don't you see? Lauren means well, but anxiety expresses other wise.

Just know before you ask questions, you may be asking the wrong person–the one who chooses not to explain.