“What would I be without her?”
The thought rose unbidden.
She crumpled in the shower,
breath gasping out of her lungs as tears fought their way to her eyes.

–––––––––––––––––

She is…
… the kind of person who high fives everyone she passes
And suffers the constant onslaught of insults from her family:
emotionless, fat, lazy, faking it, selfish, retarded

A red line from leaning on the hard wooden coffee table
“Are you cutting yourself again???”
What a casual facade of motherly concern
If she really cared, wouldn’t she insist on a psychiatric evaluation
would she demand her daughter buys her mother’s midnight medication

... a butterfly stifled by intimate intolerance.

She has so much love to give, but none for herself
Worthless  –  I don’t deserve anything
“you know, i’ve been feeling really energetic lately it’s great
but it’s weird cause i’m taking some strange risks
it’s constant
and impulsive kinda”
“What kind of risk??”
“sorry i’m making it sound too extreme
Just like “ha i’m gonna run right into traffic”
i nearly did walking home yesterday”
..
“I think i’m slipping”

A note of such strong discord I feel it reverberate through my skin into clenched fists
and a heart beating too fast
I am so powerless .. against the past

And what can I do?
Tell her it’ll be okay, that everything will change in two years in the foreign land of College
Or offer visions and promises of an eternal future together that only feels increasingly unattainable
Distract her with humor, or better yet, my own issues, so irrelevant in comparison.

She is….
… the starshine of my heavens, the blood of my veins
and I wish she were as close
I always felt like a floating individual until her
Until I started thinking I could chase the future if it held us
as one

“I can’t wait till we live together
We can listen to music in the evenings and dance on soft wood floors in the dark…”

But how can I possibly hold out hope when her escape plan is Finland
How can she possibly keep telling me she has hope for our future when it’s so easy to feel everything is doomed.
An impossible future must be preferable to an unbearable present

My dearest, my darling, the love of my life
Sits in her room alone at 3 am practicing guitar
Already dreading the rest of her life.