For as long as I could remember

I've used writing as an escape

When I came home to an empty house, so contradictory

Full of expectations of me 

I wrote

I filled page upon page with beauty and pain

Everything that I had lost, I could regain

I would listen to my mom argue with her man or my sisters in the other room

And I would spill my guts onto peices of paper 

Instead of spilling my dinner into the toilet 

I was twelve years old and I didn't know there was anything wrong with me 

I just thought

Maybe if I was pretty

They would listen to me

Maybe if I was skinny like the other girls

Someone would notice that I was important

Well no one noticed

So I bled ink, with the pen as my blood vessel

I would write tortured and mangled stories 

So that maybe the monsters in my head wouldn't make me write it on my skin that night

By this time I was fifteen and well aware of the damage I was inflicting but I didn't care

I deserved it

No one cared enough to see so I must have deserved it

Hungry for words with no time to make withdrawals of food

I stopped making deposits altogether 

My bones protruded like the imprints of letters on the opposite side of the page

I'd become everything I'd every written

Condensed to fit in one paperback spine

But, such as books are, I was prone to ripping and tearing and burning

I did it

I ripped at my skin and I tore at my hair and everything that was hidden inside those pages I'd written went up in flames

 Finally, the world could read who I'd become and it was inescapable

Now, most psych hospitals are only required to keep you for 72 hours

I spent eighteen days in, what I can only describe as, rehab 

Rehab for the tortured mind

For the frail bodied and broken willed

But the point of it all wasn't to feel imprisoned

It was to help me realized that I was liberated

There was no need to hide my words or disguise my feelings

There was nothing wrong with who I was 

It's ok to be me

 One year, four months, seven days, and several spiral notebooks later and I'm still not perfect

But no one ever really is 

The best we can do is learn to love, if not ourselves, the people around us, or the things we do

Every letter I write is love 

And this is a love that will never leave