Looking back, it hurt.
don’t try to deny that now.
There’s no escaping the fact that you were swallowed
by darkness and spit out like a polaroid, all black no white
a negative. But
You spun it into a color that is not in existence
a shade of romance that is incomparable to any variation of pink,
you hallucinated butterflies in the curve of a razor blade,
you dipped the skulls in sugar and laid them out on the marigolds
when really, they shouldn’t have been candied in the
first place.
You told me over and over that your arms were blank.
They weren’t.
You were in love with them, they were your Romeo, and you
would have died for them. For all of this you would have died because, you thought that made you a grown up. More than red lipstick, more than high heels
a downward spiral was a rite of passage and you
always the drama queen, figured that to breathe water was romantic,
to bleed was to cry from your soul, to be made up of bird bones
was to be beautiful.

I guess you’ve realized by now that you were wrong.
You weren’t breathing water, it was just air.
Your soul wasn’t crying, it was just your arms.
(You cut them. Do you remember now?)
Skeletons are dead and you are not a pile of bones because a pile of bones
is the worst kind of ugly and even that
is an understatement.

Sadness is a monster.
It will seduce you with its suicidal tendencies and you will become infatuated with your own demise it will pretend that it is your best friend and you will fall in love.
You were drinking cough syrup when you had nothing wrong with your throat
and inhaling ashes and using up the bandaids and you thought that was love.
You forgot that you used to laugh without wanting to cry you learned what liquor
tasted like and you almost
folded in on yourself. That is not beautiful. There is no sweet to the bitter there is no
idyllic idealized way to shatter.
But you forgot that too.
Your mother crying in the closet because her daughter won’t talk to her.
Your father losing sleep because he feels responsible.
Your brother punching pillows because he knows he’s helpless.
Your best friend crying because they’re this close to losing you.
And the whole time you were locked in the bathroom draining the worthlesness out and
deciding on the flowers for your own funeral.
Wake up.
That
was not
beautiful.

Looking forward, it hurts.
Scars heal and ice melts and pain dulls
but the road is unfamiliar and rock bottom left you bruised.
You’re not used to growing wings that aren’t
cuts on your collarbone
But maybe this time you’ll be able to get more than an inch off the ground and
maybe this time you will realize that
weakness and bravery
are not incompatible.