Waves

I can go days without thinking of the things that broke me.
Smiles come easy and the moments linger long and slow and sweet like honey on my lips.
The sun comes up, and I have this feeling that it's shining just for me, just to show me the world.\
Laughter bubbles up from some place within me, unbidden and easy and free.
It's a place I wish that I could stay in.

In seconds, it comes crashing down.
One word, one face, one thought, and it all falls apart like a card house blown to bits.
The memories suffocate me and settle in my lungs; tar, sticking to everything and blocking out the air.
The world falls away like ash scattered in a breeze and all I can see is the blur of unshed tears.
I refuse to cry there, anywhere.
I refuse to cry at all.
The losses form a lump in my throat until swallowing feels suspiciously like sobbing and breathing is too close to gasping for life.
I hold it down, try to drown it in the latent anger that died out long ago.
Instead, I throw pain into the all consuming grief and the feeling grows, swelling in my chest until I have to close my eyes to keep the waves inside.
I fall for days at a time, stuck beneath a tide of loss that I can't find my way out of.
I simply have to float until the waves slow down and the water recedes, leaving me heaving on a desolate, numb strip of reality.

Highway Highs

I drove down the highway laughing today.
I turned the radio up and rolled my window down until it felt like my body was soaring the same way my soul was.
As the wind blew in, the tension in my chest blew out and I could finally breathe again.
It was like the world was laughing with me, the very essence of nature echoing the joy in my very bones.
I could've driven off like that into the sunset and never looked back.
I would have if my roots here weren't so deep.
I still might one day, when there's no one waiting for me at home and there's no responsibility beckoning me back.
The feeling followed me inside, even after the wind was gone and the music had stopped.
It swirls within my heart now, light, bursting with energy and enthusiasm.
I feel like a little girl, reckless and free in the brightest and most honest sense, spinning in glittering rays of sunshine and full of the innocent, naive hope that the sun will never go down.

This Isn't Mad

Mad isn't the word I'd use to describe this hollow ache in my chest.
I've been mad before, quite often in fact.
Mad is white hot, hit before you think, blind.
This is much worse than that.
I wish I was mad, I wish I could cry and rage and scream and it'd be over.
I don't know what to do with this.
This confusion that pounds in my head.
This hurt that squeezes my heart and wets my eyes.
This missing that settles in my chest like rocks and weighs me down.
This feeling that I was all made up of you until you left.
Now, I can't breathe without filling up my lungs with unanswered questions.
I blink away stinging tears triggered by a single word, a single song.
I go on existing, afraid to live, afraid to move for fear that you might come back and I'll miss my chance again.

Morphine Melody

Unsaid words well up and sting my eyes.
I just want to forget.

I start the steady morphine melody drip,
one note at a time,
one song sustaining my heartbeat.

The pain is there, the twist in my heart.
The tug of phantom pain on my hand that itches for you.

Sometimes a line blurs it all out.
A handful of words that slip into my bloodstream and put me to sleep.
And sometimes, it lets me forget.

Sometimes the drug doesn't work,
It just paints the pain in vibrant colors.
But I let it pierce my ear and then my mind and last my heart,
drowning in the sound of forgetting you.
Without ever forgetting you at all.

Almost Midnight

It's almost midnight and I'm choking on how much I hate you.
It's clawing its way up my throat, screaming to be set free.
It's burning everything away from the inside out.
It's filling up my lungs like tar, clogging them and suffocating me.
All I can hear are the lies, all I see is your smile and the hiding daggers in your eyes.
It's almost midnight and I can't breathe because of you,
because of all you've done to me.
The way you broke me, the way you lied, the way you got my hopes up.
It's taking up too much space and I can't think straight anymore.
It's almost midnight and I can't help but hate you for who you turned out to be.

Hunger (from October daily prompt)

Desire gnaws at me like hunger.
It's painful.  Unavoidable.  Persistent.  Deadly.
It wrenches my stomach and pounds against my head.
It makes me dizzy.  It makes me sick.
It's far beyond the mild craving I once felt; the one I could live without.  This, however, is nothing like that.  That craving was uncomfortable, but it would pass.  All I had to do was wait the feeling out.  But I waited out too many cravings and now I need it.
It's no longer uncomfortable but achingly necessary.  I can feel the weakness and fatigue settling into my bones.  Without you, I can only go on for so long before I start falling apart.
The twinge in my chest is all consuming, threatening my existence.  It'll start there; the failure of my vital organs.
First my heart that broke will give out for good.
Then my voice that cried for you for too long.
Next my eyes, over dried, long run out of tears will fail me.
Last the hands that've been too far from yours for too long.
All that is left is a shattered, paper-mache skeleton, fragile and empty because you starved me out of myself.

Unfair

The people who broke us are the ones we crave when the wounds they gave us ache.

The ones who leave don't bare the scars from the fight.  And it's always the one who gets hurt that ends up dying.

We get left alone, and we hurt, and we cry, and we have problems for the rest of our life.

And they just leave.
And they're just fine without us.

It's not fair that my broken heart aches for the dozens of people who tore it apart and it's not fair that they aren't around anymore to help pick up the pieces.

Broken Fortress

I was a fortress, bracing for a coming storm.

You came in and wrecked the walls around me.

You broke down every wall before you walked out,

and left me stranded, fighting a raging storm alone.

Here I am, a storm around me and a sea I didn't know about,

 washing in from outside.

I'm drowning.

A girl wrecked by blue eyes and a couple of words,

no fortress to protect me from the pain I knew was coming.

Sick Sights

It's been almost seven months now, since I burned that bridge.  I knew it would be hard but I thought I'd be over it by now.
I knew it was coming, the dreaded sighting.  At the store, on the road, somewhere, somehow, I knew I'd see you all around.
I knew it was coming, I don't know how.  It was that sixth sense, I guess, that we all have.  You say someones name and they walk around the corner.  For me, it was a plaguing paranoia that came from out of the blue.
My head snapped around too fast when I saw your car.  It was too obvious.  It was too dramatic.  It was involuntary and unstoppable.
After all this time, I still had a sickeningly visceral, physical reaction.
I felt like I was going to be sick.  I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.  I couldn't breathe.  I dare say a tear fell.  All of it, at once, unannounced, unbecoming, unwanted, unwarranted.
Seven months and it still hurts.  The fake apologies.  The lies.  The excuses.

After seven months, time still gets to me.  It whispers in my ear and makes me doubt myself.  It pushes me into dark, lonely places at night.  It makes me want to reach out, to say it was my fault.

I won't.  It wasn't, not entirely at least.  But it still hurts.  And I wonder if it will ever stop or if I'll have to live in this town praying not to see any of you for the rest of my life.

Lacking Eloquence

I tried to write something eloquent.  I tried to make the simple complex.  I tried to make the ugly beautiful.  And still I stare at an empty page while I drown in emotion.

Do I write of the pain?  How I sat there tonight and for the first time, you didn't fall in across from me?

Do I write of the haunting space?  How you're in this town and yet, you feel so completely absent?

Do I write of the distance?  How there are 1,700 miles between me and a possible future I may never get the chance of taking?

Or do I write of the confusion that stirs when all of these problems slam into my heart at once?  How I miss you and want to know what I've done?  How I want to see you?  How I want to see him?  How I feel twisted for wanting you both?

The pain is physical.  An aching chest.  A shaking hand.  A pounding head.  A weak heart.

And still the page sits empty and still I sit alone and still he is not here and sill you're gone.