You’re In the Blink

9^th grade, you don’t really remember

(tears and hospitals and surgery and chemo and casseroles and muffled silence)

just more presence, when it used to come home at dinner time.

(you adjust)

You become more independent when they need you to and you isolate yourself because that’s who you are.

(don’t grow up though; you’re too selfish to grow up just yet)

Ships with Holes Will Sink

10^th grade you’re exhausted and unbearably sad and busy and run impossibly thin on three fronts.

You fail for the first time and it picks at the seams of your family.

Fights go:

arguing

 quickly devolve to shouting

 you cry.

You’re up against a wall and your brain won’t work correctly to not fail.

You’re spiraling but you’re too busy and tired and done to care.

God

 you want to die die die.

(just temporarily until this all blows over)

You’re exhausted and your back is killing you.

(it’s probably just a bad muscle knot)

Why does your body hate you so much?

(your joints already ache in the cold and the rain and all the time

what was it like, to not hurt all the time?) 

You’re too cowardly and curious.

(spoiler alert: you don’t die) 

Well I Still Have My Health (At Least that’s What They Tell Me)

11^th grade is righteous anger.

Your breathe fire and brimstone, smoke spilling from your lips.

You want to rip and burn and tear apart that idiot for ruining your year.

You’re livid at the world for heaping this steaming pile of crap right on your already, definitively shitty, situation.

(in the shape of a boy whose so unbelievably pathetic and terrible and selfish selfish)

You’re furious at your back, at your spinal disc, at yourself for not even being able to getup in the morning.

You collapse for the first time.

(get right back up on a shaky leg and a shaky resolve)

You have trouble sleeping and trouble getting up in the morning and trouble breathing and trouble existing.

You argue about college and New York but give it up.

(you don’t really, smile and nod and turn around and do the opposite thing)

You take your anger and ride it through the entire year

until it simmers out and leaves you scared.

(parents only love and support you as far as you obey them)

I Followed Fires

12^th grade and you forge your resolve in steel.

Your family mends its self.

(then tears out the seams again and again)

You decide to go to New York anyway.

(you bring it up one more time and are shut down in record time)

(you wonder whether or not they’ll cut you off

it doesn’t matter too much either way you tell yourself)

You renew some friendships to their old grandeur.

(if you could you would punch past-you in the face so incredibly hard)

You would love Savannah if you weren’t so dead set on New York

You want so bad it hurts, and it’s relentless and all consuming.

You’re ready to get blood in your mouth and dirt under your nails and forsake family and safety and all sanity.

(just for this only for this)

It’s still unfinished, but you’re ready to burn so gloriously.