When Almost Is Stuck In Your Chest

Physical pain hurts less than this ache in my chest

Emotional pain registers as physical but your body can’t fix it so it goes on pulsing

Trust me I would rip out my lungs if it would quite the screaming that echoes from between my ribs or slowed the race of my heart as it tries to get away

I’ve always preferred physical pain because I can handle it

Control it

If something is going to hurt you you may as well decide what and where

Plus it gives your mind something tactile to focus on.

Touch starved

Fed by broken fingernails and bent paper clips

Back and forth, rip and tear

Same place, so they only ask once

If they ask at all.

I begin pulling out hair because four years is a lot of time to just give up to a release

but if I don’t break the skin it doesn’t count, right?

So the pen scraps my skin raw, covering scars not quite half a decade old

And I’m not really hurting myself so I must have a handle on it

Addiction takes many forms.

There is no bottle to throw out here, nowhere to vomit up my sins

They say there is strength in admitting weakness but they fail to mention the swift trip down the drain that follows when your tears mix with the blood pumping through your veins

A friend you haven’t seen in so long you forget what she looks like but you remember her beautiful

She makes the gnawing stop. Turns the focus to a single point on a wrist long marred. Give you a task to complete. A mess to both create and to clean. She is your oldest friend and it has been so long since you spoke, the rose-colored glasses that thicken with time have made you miss her

It has been years since she crossed your mind and you almost feel guilty for having left her neglected, have forgotten the trouble she caused in the first place

We personify our demons in order to remove them from ourselves but all that does is provide us someone to turn to,

I could never love a thing that is me but I miss her in the way that I image love feels like. Because she is not me and that gives me permission to attach to her the control I felt when she was around

I miss the strength of a secret

Of cheating death

I have not felt this way for so long that my memory has shied from the weakness that I was

And yet have never felt this way before

Because each episode is different

I thought she gone for good

That I could move on with my life and replace her with other

With something real, someone maybe

But she’s back

Almost a comfort

But I don’t give in

Not yet

Instead, I sit here in the semi-darkness of a reading light too far across the room to bother turning off

Even the four steps it would take to get there are an insurmountable distance

Like the distance, I have made between myself and the woman I was yesterday.

All that progress,

Is gone.

All that time,

A waste.

Then I remind myself,

All those memories

Mean

Nothing.