One Step At A Time.

I fell into a dark place. Again. I do this to myself, and I don't kick and scream and fight it like I should. I'm scared of taking help from people. I'm scared of everything. I'm trying to pull myself back up, but the bottom line is that when all the ground falls out from underneath you and there's dirt under your nails from trying to hold on, all you can really do is smile and say 'Oh, I'm fine.' Let's backtrace every connection in my brain. Let's slice open our entities and rework them. Let's, for the sake of our sanity, take off all our clothes and pull our hair back and paint a mural on each other. This is not a conceptual happenstance. I am not the lost soldier returning home through snow and sea, miles behind the rest of the troops. I am still in battle. You see me, but you don't. And sometimes, if I'm counting, my breath slows down and whenever I see couples holding hands, I think, there. There is what that hole in me is, because no one tells me how pretty I look in the morning, and no one asks me how I want my eggs or makes me sundaes when I ask. Visceral encompassment, swallow me whole.

You keep my heart b-b-b-beating, like the pull of the universe is dragging me closer into you. You are an island, and I am the breaker waves, keeping every part of you held together and eroding the outlines of your shoreline. More than that, you are the moon. Dragging me in when you're close and, the further away you get, the harder you push. Why can't I be eighteen forever? Life was so simple then. Before I grew my hair long and filled up an entire room with my words. Absolution starts with a breaking away of every layer, and I am inbetween layers. Too far down from the last one to pull myself back into it, but not close enough to the next to start peeling it away. And this version of me is not really me, this shell of insecurities and doubts that has become a room where I sit and stare at the wall for hours and think thoughts in triple speed. You do not understand, because no one ever has or ever will, but I need you to slow me down. Be my safe place. Be my room and my blankets so I can shut the door on everyone else and crawl up under and into you and breathe.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. And let me be the one who calls you baby all the time.