If I Must Abandon Myself To Earn Their Smiles, What Are They Worth To Me Anymore.

I am a mimic that sacrifices her true face to embody others, and I fool everyone but myself.

I’m not going to hate myself anymore.

My age is, youngish, oldish? Depending on who you ask. I have time, and I don’t. The future is so far away and right outside my doorstep, and I’m just sort of here. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting to become my future self and grow out of all this childish shit. I have trouble discerning bad habits and personality traits, what grows from me isn’t all me after all. I have to take care with what I cull and what I cradle. I could become a walking quirk from middle school that I misidentified as wildly important to my sense of self and not just a random cultural reflex. What makes me myself? And how did it get there? What is genuinely me and what is grimly biding it’s time until I figure out it’s a stranger’s voice and not mine?

Remembering him is like biting glass. I don’t know why I do it, why I keep hurting myself on the sharp details of his shattered memory. His eyes, such a pale blue, had a depth to them you wouldn’t expect like stagnant ocean water. My mouth bleeds as I masticate his face, the way words would leave his mouth; his voice is like rows of pins in my tongue. I can’t help myself but to recall him, over and over again, no matter the pain. I think that’s what draws me to recollection actually, feeling anything again. It’s the numbness that lets you drift into autopilot, living while asleep, that ruins you so much more deeply. Losing a loved one, and yourself along with them.

I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.

If you want to know what someone wants, watch what they give away. Love, time, compliments. People think others yearn the same way they do, and they reveal themselves in these little interactions; the way daylight escapes blinds midday.

I can’t have children, I’d have too much love for them. I’d bring them up scared of the world like I am. Scared of nothing and everything at the same time.

I want to know peace for while, if that’s alright. If the world can spare it for someone like me.

Oh, I feel warm. I feel warm like the sun even in the darkest of rooms. I am me again.

Art by alayne