A string of sleepless nights and a paranoid heart
There will never be enough time
If that’s even all it takes.
These used to be warning signs
Now it’s just a Saturday night and the people around me
I didn’t feel at home anyways.
Our hearts love for different reasons
So I can’t blame the storm sent to bury the sun.
You reach out your hand with a face that begs me to hold on
I shrug and look away, “It’s not that easy anymore.”
If I haven’t felt normal in two years, maybe this is the new normal.

I ease into the seat and let my feet fall into rhythm on the pedals while I watch the numbers fall.  150 miles of Kevin Devine playing through the speakers while my thoughts freefall through my mind until they’re replaced by the sound of waves and I’m standing in the sand.  The wind tangles my long hair and a salty mist covers my coat and I feel each grain of sand inside my boot.  I freeze these moments.  The sea is my tears and my sweat and it’s in my blood.  It’s apart of me.  I feel mangled and weathered and torn like the shells on the edge but this is where I piece myself back together, where things make sense.  We walk on the boardwalk bundled in coats and sweaters but the ocean will still be the same when I return in my summer skin.  My mind repeats over and over, “How did I get here?  How did I get here?”  It’s so easy to Believe when I see the patterns in the waves and wonder how the ocean doesn’t spill itself onto the land and take us all.  Let it go, throw it into the sea.  It’s big enough to swallow my problems for good and gentle enough to carry me on its surface until I find some safe land. 

I feel like I have no words left, but then I sit down with pen and paper and I fill up page after page.  I guess I just don’t know what I would say out loud because it won’t even matter.  I’m gone and distant and cold and forgotten.  I wish it was just a big misunderstanding, but my fear is that this is what happens when things just end for lack of trying or lack of caring.  The way people cut ties so easily, like time never happened.  I’ll never understand how it’s so effortless and I won’t give up without a fight even if I’m going to lose.  I have so much to say but nothing comes out and all these thoughts are burning through my brain until they’re just smoke and charred remains.  I don’t know what to think anymore but it’s all I do, day and night.  I’m restless and unsure and even though I know I’m safe, I’m still scared of this.

I slip away quickly as it flows through my blood and I can forget for a little while, but it always comes back, gasping for air.  We’re sitting at a table and the rain falls outside while we’re wasting away under flourescent lights.  Time is slipping down our throats and colors blend together like weightless clouds colliding into each other.  Without saying a word, there’s an understanding here.  You’ve got yours, and I’ve got mine, and we won’t talk about it in the open.  Then I hear someone say “she’s pretty” and I look away, because if even the best can break apart and dissolve and melt away to absolutely nothing in the blink of an eye, then I don’t even want to know what the worst can do.  There’s nothing left here, but I can search on my hands and knees until they’re scraped and bruised to find something, anything, to give away but I can’t let that happen again.

I know it was real because there was beauty in the leaves.  The weather never did anything wrong, even when it poured and the rain soaked through my clothes, chilling my skin and sending me shivering to the car.  I wonder what it’s like to feel weightless, to float away and leave behind these working parts without thinking twice about it, because all I do is dig until there’s nothing left in the ground and my hands are left raw and bleeding and stiff from its tight grip.  Your arms have grown cold and someone else is finding beauty in the melting snow while these words roll off my tongue like wet cement and I still try to find the reasons or even a speck of understanding.  I know more than you think, and it hits me like bullets in the chest every time.  There’s always something better, but it’s really all the same.