i can decline my mother's invitations,
but eventually
my guilt grabs me by the neck
and my family
at the other end of it
drags me back.

the photos of my siblings
smiling together and
doing things i don't like to do,
or can't,
are the ones that i remember.
maybe they're the only ones
i'm even looking for.

maybe
i'm just looking for proof.

and maybe that's why
i hear favors as demands
and the "thank you"s that follow
as sarcasm.

i can feel annoyance around me
pressurized as it scrunches into
the smaller space of air available
when i enter a room,
and everybody winces a little
to keep from acknowledging the displacement.

the things that will
alienate
me from everyone else
are the only things
that will show themselves to me.

i have optimism about everything.
i want to be warm, comfortable and wrapped up in my cloud-like blankets. when the sun comes up i feel like they’ve brought me home with them. how can i possibly leave that golden air? that floating air?

the only thing is the cold air, calling. come down, climb down those tall mountains of cold rocks, feel the cold in your numb fingers losing grip on the comfort.
it brings me out, eventually, in order to feel my blood spike. the cold gives me the goosebumps i need for sandpaper skin that threatens the soft things and keeps them away. for now i need that cold. shivering body adaptation. high gear metabolism. and all of this discomfort means i can now go to bed tired, like i should, always, but don’t. always. and there’s my white, light, and blue cocoon, a different love than from this whole day. familiar love that i know so well. my bed is an end-in-sight motivator to the harsh mind i’ve cultivated, that grows stronger in the new light of every new day.

one happiness comes in trade for another, but it isn’t an ultimatum. i have a happiness in one that give me a happiness in its result, the result in which i can recognize in the middle of the other happiness. and in that happiness, the second wind, i can enjoy the act and reap the reward of the other. and this in turn sends rewards, redeemable when i enter the other half of my world. i feed off myself always, and yet, i’m growing. i’m becoming. i’m wasting away in the glow of all of this happiness. don’t be afraid, little voices, the fade is the goal. it’s the way i live if i am to live at all.

but i see you watch, and they watch, as they try to notice if i’ve become even more transparent than the last time they saw me. i see them try to pinpoint when, exactly, that last time was. how long has it been and has she forgotten us, and oh, oh, does she love us at all anymore?

if a decision were presented now - must be chosen -
i would leave.
i would leave my concerned baby voices, the only ones to ever call me by a nickname. and i would leave the grandparents who have been planning on seeing me for weeks.
and i would certainly leave my parents, who love me, but drain me of my lifeblood every time i come home.

all of this could happen any day, any time following the breaking of my cocoon, any time while my skin-speckled skin fights off the temperature of the conditioned air breezing through the doors of school buildings.

destruction leaves me in wonder. i watch a movie alone to let the marvel on my face show uninhibited while the screen pans past a blood-stained rug. lift the rug, faux hand, identified with my own for the next two hours now, lift the rug and find the still-wet streaks of a striking liquid red.

pan, eyes, to the doorway covered in eye-sized freckles staining the cheeks and nose, the [bone] structure of the house. it’s friends may never even recognize it now.

and what if houses are living with each other in their little divisions; the people inside are diseases like the depression is in me. people spill speech about wanting to kill the evil inside of them. sometimes i think i can coax mine, convince it to cross the threshold of the screen door on its own.

oh, good friend, that foreign cell attacked by other cells, you look so well inhabited with so many thoughts not your own. i hardly recognize you, looking so open, all of this brain and body space to roam around in, to fill up with the moving wind. yes, all of that heavy footed-furniture, all gone with the wind.

my pale blank skin is interrupted by these mossy bruises, green from my elbow to my wrist. twice as soft. too cold to live too long.

pale blank skin, dark blank eyes. all i could do was wait for the monotony to break and hope i wouldn't bore myself to death.

but i am dirt, to be raked and stabbed. i watch myself crumble. i plant more seeds of sorrow and i cover them up, internalized. keep them damp with salt water. give them sun when you're around.

today i am a gardener. i cultivate roses from my own green thumbs, flush them out with my newly irrigated veins.

how can i be stuck
again
inside myself

when i can still find
little red stains of evidence
on the floor in the hallway.
on my bedsheets.
on the new wooden floors of
the newly remodeled bathroom.

they are just as visible
and just as overlooked
as every single scar
on my mutilated body.

thirteens stitches could seal me up
but parts of my body
are still out there
for everyone to step on.

I've got goosebump bullets trying to pry my pores open, but all get stuck halfway through. The sting lingers, and now my skin repels touch, the way my eyes repel even the thought of touch. My mutations are self sabotage as a coping mechanism.