“do you feel failure?”
she inquires, sipping her tea.
no care in her soul
therapy
Sometimes at night I can’t sleep.
I’m not sure why, seeing as all my life I’ve been the exact opposite. I’ve always loved a good nap. A lazy sprawl in the sun, a blanket thrown across my body, drool falling delicately onto my pillow. At night I craved the wonderful nothingness. I jumped into bed and rested. Moments later I sank into sweet sweet oblivion.
It’s different now. I’m not quite sure when it changed. Sometime early 2012 maybe. A general unrest began eating away at my gut. I would scratch at my stomach so no one saw the little wounds. I felt I was terrible, something deserving to be in pain. 13 year olds shouldn’t feel that way. It’s been six years and there isn’t much left of my stomach. Acid anxiety takes and takes and takes.
I’m tired, by god I’m tired, but the ticking sound in my head doesn’t let me rest. I close my eyes and immediately it’s there. It whispers directly behind my ear, like a secret only I can know. The words hiss out at me: failure, Never, burden, Get, embarrassment, Better. I crawl into a ball and fall weak to the things that I know I’ve created myself. My brain is it’s own entity hell bent on self destruction and I’m just a casualty. It used to just be at night that I couldn’t move because of the shaking fear in my heart, but now it’s every day. I can’t go to a coffee shop without my hands shaking. I can’t buy an ice tea without thinking about the repercussions. Can’t think, cant move, can’t act.
Sometimes my brain comes out in heavy breaths, sometimes it comes out in sobbing. Great angry things that shake the earth. Exhales so short, inhales attempted to be long but still not enough. Grasping for air and grasping for any sort of reality. I slip off a cliff into the void and I’m shrouded in darkness. I’m drowning, gasping for breath. Hands shaking, sobs rolling out of me, nails digging perfect half moons in my legs and sometimes I’m scared it wont stop. Sometimes it doesn’t stop. Sometimes I sit in my room and allow the dark to consume me. Take what I once was and drag me into nothingness, make me a fragment of the girl I was. Sometimes I can still hear her. A smile, two dimples right below her eyes. The one on the left deeper than the one on the right. Freckles and awkward dirt stained knees. As I am dragged down I can hear her laughing. The sound of a sweet bell on a dreary Sunday. She’s dead. The childish hope and wonder lost in the dark maze that is anxiety. The dark maze that is depression. The pit grows darker. It just consumes. Eats and eats until I’m gone. A shadow of what I once was.
Sometimes at night I can’t sleep.
Sunshine Poetry and Thoughts 