Peace

This is my second cigarette. I’ve had this balcony for four years and this is the first time I've actually been out here. It’s fitting I chose to bring nothing but this cigarette and the lighter I’ve had no use for but for candles for the last two years. It’s funny Target won’t let you buy a lighter if you’re not 21.

I've finished the cigarette. I’m sitting next to its butt and its ashes. I have to clean up before my parents come home but I can’t bring myself to get up. I can’t bring myself to do much lately. I am trapped in a cycle I don’t know how to break. I destroy my lungs or my stomach lining (I destroy my lungs and my stomach lining) thinking they'll bring me peace and relief and they do but not without making me sick right after. So fucking sick that I can’t get up. I’m so fucking sick. I’m sick of myself. I make myself sick on purpose and I hate it. But I keep doing it.

I see the messages coming in on my phone, I hear my friends reaching out. It doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t wanna speak to them and it makes me feel bad but I don’t care enough to respond. The pain in my stomach is unbearable. I am full and I am stuffed and I am full and I am stuffed with emotions. And my brain is working overtime but it can’t process the pain and it can’t process everything else.

Between all that I feel, it is a shame peace is so temporary. It is a shame happiness is so fleeting. It is a shame that I wasn’t always like this, and I was once much better. A lot of things are such a shame. And at the end of the day, none of it matters because no one will know. No one will ever know but me. Because I’ve convinced myself that I am all I have. And if I am all I have then I must listen to myself, even when I am not well. And Lord knows I am not well.

I go to bed hoping the new day will bring me peace like it brings the sunrise. But the sunrise is temporary. And what eventually follows is the nightfall. And as the night falls, so do I. I fall further into places I don’t like to be in. And I wallow and I pray. I plead for the me in the future to scream a little louder, so that maybe I can hear her. So that maybe I will hear her, and I will listen to her. And that in listening to her, I will be better. But I can’t hear her. She’s either too quiet, or everything is too loud. I turn the music down but I still can’t find her. Sometimes I’m afraid she doesn’t exist. Worst of all, I’m afraid she’s just like me, and she won’t speak to me because she knows it.

I don’t tell my mother how I feel and all I do is listen to my sister. My friends get stories of trivial things and anecdotes that don’t mean anything. All that is valuable, all that is real, lives in ink on paper or in fingerprints over my keyboards. It lies beside me when I go to bed and sits in the passenger seat when I drive, anywhere.

My hands smell like cigarettes now. My clothes are on my shower floor. Despite how bad I (always) feel, I seem to live in a state of acceptance. That this is who I am. This is what has happened to me and I can try all I want to change it, but we both (me and I) know it will backfire. So I don’t try, until I do, and it does, and this all will happen again.

My brain is a mush of everything anyone can feel. I am afraid my hair will still smell of cigarettes even out of the shower. I will scrub and scrub, I will wash it twice over. I will try, because it is all I know how to do. I hope I succeed.