I’m An Open Book

I’m an open book, I say it proudly.

Annoyance stains my face like ink from a broken pen. Love lights up my dirty brown eyes like a Christmas tree right before dawn. Anger fogs my mind like tornado clouds sweeping in on bright blue skies.

You can pick me up and skip to any chapter, reading me for a minute and setting me back down on a dusty bookshelf. Or you may walk right by me, forever searching for a more beautiful cover image, a different storyline, a less depressing ending. There are those few people, as well, who will buy me, religiously reading me from cover to cover, committing every word to memory.

The funny thing is, though, that every author has chapters of their novels they never read out loud. Maybe their words didn’t weave into the story in a flawless pattern of consonants and vowels to please them enough to share with the world. Or the pain stitched into the words are still too great to release into the lives of others.

Whichever reader you may end up being, however open faced I am, with words upon words staining my pale white pages in black and blue, never forget that I’ve also got unread chapters. Buried deep beneath blood, sinew and bone, etched into my ribcage and the underside of my very heart is where these words are hidden.

I hide these words because they make me a hypocrite, the very opposite of everything I portray to others.

I’ll encourage you to call or message me whenever you need me, whenever your heart is shattering and you’re too scared of cutting yourself on the sharp edges. Little do you know, the sharp edges will later be pressed against the skin on my forearm creating beautiful rivers of red dripping down my wrist.

I’ll beg you to allow me to sketch a map for your scattered wayward thoughts to follow so that your body doesn’t follow them into dangerous territory. Only, you don’t realise that for me to be able to sketch you this map, it’s already been engrained into my mind because I’ve spent so much time in those high hills and deep canyons.

I’ll break down your walls and swim through an ocean of your tears just to battle your darkest, innermost demons. When my one man army has defeated the boss, and you fall slowly to sleep is when my battle back to solid ground begins and I don’t have the strength to withstand the tides, allowing it to pull me back under.

I’d spill my soul over your cold body, warming the cold shivers of your fever, lending you everything I have left to make you feel better. I’d leave you every part of me, leaving myself an empty shell of nothingness. Afterall, it’s better than the suffocation of feeling everything all at once.

But these words, these chapters that you can glimpse upon in the scarred lines over bright blue veins are too difficult for me to reveal. Too precious for your fragile heart to have to take on.

And I’ll remain an open book, with a locked heart and a broken key, hidden far beneath layers upon layers of pain.