Growing Pains

I was a child when we met, but now I am older.
You are still children, and I'm sorry for that, but I have changed.
You drag me down, demanding and competing and whispering; like skeletal hands pulling me back into the grave.
I answer to no one, to myself perhaps, certainly not to you.
I find my own way, and it does not belong to you, and you do not belong here.
Along the way, somewhere, our paths split apart and now you're blaming me for leaving.
You kicked me out, abandoned me, and then questioned why I left.

It's different now, with different people.  Not with you at all.
They listen, understand, and care.  But nothing I do invalidates them.
We are allowed, you see, to succeed together without one taking away from the other.
This is real, this is age, this is growing.
And I like it so much better here than where I began.
It hurts to grow like this; to become a different sort of person than who I was before, but it's pain that indicates a better future.
Stagnation is death in this life, and at last, I am growing while leaving you behind.

When I'm With You

I like me better when I'm with you.

The panic doesn't eat at my lungs and my heart when I sit beside you.  Or maybe it does.  Maybe it's just easier because I know the same feeling is eating you up too.  Maybe it's not that you make me feel better, but that we drown together in the fear and it's not so devastatingly lonely.

I like me better when I'm with you.

The laughs come easy and the words that bubble out of my mouth don't feel so out of place when I'm saying them to you.  I don't feel separated from my body and my life when I'm with you.  In fact, I'm terrifyingly alive and present.

I like me better when I'm with you.

You take me serious when I plan to escape.  You listen and you plan to go with me.  You don't let the world feel lonely, and you don't make me take it on alone.  You indulge my crazy fantasy futures and you build yourself a place in all of them beside me.

I like me better when I'm with you.

I like existing in a world where you understand my shorthand and you share my obsession.  I just wish I was with you now.