Just Sleep

Once upon a time, I was a girl.  Naive and hopeful, but she was broken long ago.
Once upon a time, I was a warrior.  Fire and steel, but she got tired of eternal battles.
Now, I am a stranger to myself and the world but I don't know how to find my way back to either version of what I was before.
Too broken to be whole, too whole to be broken, I am instead numb.
I feel the painful, picking, tingle of the world around me but I am not part of it.  Not anymore.  Not yet.
I seem trapped in a bubble; seeing but not being seen, listening but hearing nothing, screaming totally silent.
The path behind me is destroyed.  Invisible.  Impassable.
The fire that lit my way has long since burned out.
I am left in the dark, not knowing where to step next.
I spin in dizzying circles of stagnation and an empty, hollow, aching kind of pain.
Everything around me looks hauntingly familiar in a way that knots up terror beneath my sternum and yet, it's not the world I knew.
It's a muffled, fragmented space that no longer has a place for me.
I have no name, no place, no plan to escape.
I feel it should terrify me to my core but it instead inspires in me a bone deep kind of weary.
All it does is make me want to sleep.
Sleep and sleep and sleep until this bubble I'm trapped in pops and the cotton is my ears comes out and the world comes into focus again.
Sleep until the girl I'm meant to be can find me and wake me.
Sleep and sleep and sleep.

Standing Still

Last time I felt this way, it broke me.

He took my hope, my heart, my love, and he crushed it all.

I wasn't sure I was even capable of ever feeling that way again.

But here you are.

My head is spinning and my heart is beating much too loud.

It makes me want to run, to be reckless, to avoid the possibility of a promise.

But I'm trying not to run.

I'm standing still while my skin sets to fire, while anxiety blooms in my chest to choke me.

I'm letting tears burn my eyes as panic squeezes my lungs until there's no air left for me to breathe.

I'm letting fear eat me alive for a chance with you.

I keep thinking if I let it kill me long enough, I'll make it out alive.

But I'm terrified, confused, and exhausted.

I need you to make a move before it's all to much and I run to something I'll regret.

Please, I'll hold still for as long as I can, but you've got to move.