faulty signals

I'd like to tell you I'm on my period and that's why I have been crying for an unknown better portion of my day. I'm a girl and I'm emotional- is why I'm breathing heavy and sniffling hard. I've just gone through a tragic breakup, someone died, my parents are divorcing, someone I love has cancer...

I'd like to tell you these things are making me cry.

That the gasping for life itself as I wheeze silently so my peers don't hear, is because of some reason. I wish I could say I value staying here.

Living.

Because of some other reason then I can't hurt my parents that way. That I can't have my brother grow up to say he did have an older sister. And then have to repeat over and over how I died. Because I wanted to. I can't do that to him. So I'm here.

But sometimes I wonder if they knew how much pain I'm in on nights like these. Nights where my heart feels like it's malfunctioning, where my chest locks up, not in the strong way but in the sense that it's tense, that the muscles wrapped around my rib cage feel the need to constrict... where my stomach disagrees with what food I probably fought to put into me, when my head clouds up and every thought no matter how happy and pure and real it is cripples me.

Makes me wanna scream but I don't have air left in me to do so. When my body feels so small, yet so heavy. If they could see me fold into myself the way a spider does when it dies, clinging onto my physical self, groping not out of self security but out of pain, holding on to myself tightly hoping my body can relax in the smaller space.

Feeling myself and hating what I touch, crying harder as I realize this. Laying low enough that the neighbors whose window peers into mine can't see me in this fit. Playing music to both drown out my sounds to my peers, and to hopefully distract me. It's unfortunate I figured out that it's also to distract me, that thought saddens me. That I feel sick, crazy and sick in the head. Confused that the thing that racks itself for logic in these moments is also the thing that's making me feel this way. Sending faulty signals telling my body to revolt and refuse to just be.

Why is this so hard?

Why can't my life be draining in just the normal ways?

Why must my soul be vacuumed clean each week, day, morning and night?

I wonder if they knew this, if they would understand me having the bad bad thoughts I have when I feel like this is never going to end. Last week in therapy I compared this to a panic attack, knowing it would end. But here's the difference, panic attacks don't come like this does, I don't feel that panic attacks are part of my core and my being. They are a result of me not tending to my anxieties for too long, and when the episode happens I understand why, and I know it'll end. This doesn't feel like it's going to end. This feels like it's a routine. But not a habitual routine I formulated and constructed, no this is something out of my control, out of a broken, misfiring fragmented part of my brain that doesn't even know how to tell itself it's doing its job wrong.

Something I feel has only further fallen apart like a car with a check engine light that you neglect. My engine lights been on, and I've tossed on my hazards, I've pulled to the side after driving years upon miles with it on, I've finally pulled over, not to say I haven't in the past but I'm fearing that my car is going to stop restarting, that this pit stop, this off to the side forced stop is it. Since it's becoming more frequent it's becoming less of an option. It's out of my control, it's out of the systems control, it's broken.

I'm broken.