A House That Is Not A Home

Everyone around me knowns something is not right.
     From strangers on the street to my dearest friends and family, they all know something is foundamentally wrong.  Their understanding is skin deep, but it is there nonetheless.  I have passed out tokens of my pain, pieces of my struggle, and allotments of my sickness.  To them I have given every ingrident they would need to facribcate a perception of my agony.  Yet they say nothing.  They do nothing because to them, I am nothing. 
     I am but a disappointment, a glaring smudge on their picture picture life that is tainted by my existances.  They have this way of seeming so concerned, so outwardly afflicted by my troubles, that people outside of our home are wholly convinced I am well taken care of.  To some extend this is true.  But beyond this empty notion of the perfect parents, I am nothing but a scared child, bruised and broken, crying on the bathroom floor, riddled with scars and crying out for help. 
     My panic falls on deaf ears.  My family is content with leaving me to myself to fix my wounds and heal my scars.  They do not wish to taint their hands with the messiness of my blood. 
     I understand, yes, but I also cringe when I see this for myself.  With a great sense of clairity, I realize why they don't wish to entangle themselves with my problems, but they are my family. 
     I would do anything for them, but they, they will not even look at me.  I cannot count the days they have not been here for me when I needed them. 
     And when they suddenly feel as though it's time to replenish our reputation of the perfect family, I am given attention.  Suddenly, I am worthing caring for.  From there, we are bombarded with acknoledgement and appraisals of how truly wonderful and functional and happy our family is. 
     But that is all lies. 
     Those strangers were not in my room, crying with me on my floor, when my parents brought three small children into our home and expected me to love them and take care of them as if I was not a child myself.  A child who so desperatley needed her parents.  When I needed my family the most, that was when they brought into our home three more children they were not fit to take care of. 
     It was me who was left with the burden of taking care of them.  It was me who cried herself to sleep at night while my mother read them a story and stayed with them until they fell asleep.  It was me who was forced to sit and watch while those children received more love and affection in that year in a half than I have ever felt in my entire life. 
     My family expected me to accept them as sisters, but they took away the only haven I ever had.  Before, my home was just that: a home.  A safe place, a sanctuary, but now it is a reminder of how I was never enough.  When those children came into my home, it proved that my family was capable of loving the broken and healing the wounds of scarred children. 
     That was when I realized I was too great a burden. 
     That was when I realized it was all lies.  I was never what they wanted. 
     You see, my family is so good at faking.  They are conissuerous at trickery and deceit.  They can make strangers believe almost anything, but those strangers never see what goes on when their fake smiles fade and their attention drifts to anything but me.  They don't see what goes on in the dark of my house that is no longer a home.  They don't see that my parents are so full of lies, and that to them, I am so easily forgotten and replaced. 
     They don't see that while I am strong and unfeeling and reserved, I am still a child who wants nothing more than her mother to keep her safe from the monsters. 

Secrets

Secrets are kept for a reason.  And these reasons are incredibly specific to the individual keeper, even if they are not aware of it themselves; the rationale is always there, lurking, growing, becoming as deadly as the secrets they protect.  Petty reasons, vain reasons, frightful reasons, and in some instances, reasons that have lost all meaning or allusion that they might have once seemed to acquire.  Sometimes people hold onto secrets for the blandest of reasons, and because of their vapidity, reasoning sometimes disappear altogether.  This, however, is a terribly frightening occurrence because without a concrete sense of logic surrounding the core reason why you decided to implode and keep locked inside yourself all the things that scare you the most, you will quickly lose sight of yourself, the self you knew before the mind and the secret fused into one body and one soul, never to be separated, betrothed together for the purpose of locking away pernicious memories and poisonous pieces of knowledge that will only ever be known in the darkest pit of your heart. 

            Yes, people keep secrets for reasons, and these secrets are not to be tampered with.   Secrets are easy to form and oh so easy to hide behind.  But what they lack in difficulty upon creating them, they make up for in kind in the difficulty required to break free from their tenacious hold. 

Perfect

When I am exhausted, I will not sleep.

When I am hungry, I will not eat.

And when I am finished and am finally set free,

I will be perfect; just like I’ve wanted to be.

But until then, I will turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they may teach me how not to need.

For I am of absolutely no worth and deserve nothing but my own shame.

Not for long.

Soon, I will be perfect.

I will be thin, light as a feather, floating on air, barely there.

Soon, I will disappear, and leave no trace of myself behind for others to find.

I will die today.  When the clock strikes midnight, I will be gone forever.

And when the sun rises, I will be the one they want.

I will be the daughter they have always wanted, the beautiful friend, the one everyone notices and adores. 

I will be the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame. 

I will be the picture of beauty, thin and self-sustaining. 

Like a plant, I will train myself to relieve on nothing, to draw nourishment from the air.    

Yes, I will die today.  When I fall asleep, I will disappear, as if I was never here. 

And when I wake, I will be the perfect mannequin. 

                                               

A Friend

All that I wanted today was to be let out. 

     I am so tired of these cages.  Life was never supposed to be an enclosure, keeping you from all the things that are within your reach except for the steel bars and layers of windowless walls and miles of barbwire.  Life was not always like this, but that is what it has become. 

     A nightmare of the realest sense.  There are monsters and fears and limitations that can overpower and frighten a person of any age, but here, everything is so much scarier. 

     I think we all reach a point in our lives when we stop looking for monsters under our beds, noticing they have moved, or perhaps, disappeared.  For some people, the monsters never show up again.  And for others, the monsters live inside them. 

     Sometimes the monsters are us.  We are our own bullies, our own personal hell on earth. 

     And it's difficult to escape something that is attached to both your body and your mind.  So we try to kill the us on the outside, kill the thing on the inside. 

     Suicide is an option, as death always is.  People cringe when they hear the word because they don't realize that death is a friend.  Death is like the moon; it never leaves.  The sun sees us at our brightest moments, and then tires of us, and leaves us alone without looking back. 

     The moon is different, a loyal friend.  The moon realizes how different we are in the dark.  Death is like the moon in the way that is never forsakes us.  With open arms, it follows us around like a shadow, waiting patiently for the moment when we realize the world is no longer a safe place. 

      Other times, death is too easy, too generous, too charitable.  Sometimes we deserve a messy death, a cruel existence.  We failed to become ourselves and so we must suffer the consequence of being a ghost with a beating heart.  In our time on the earth, we did not spare the world of our face, and karma wants vengeance. 

     Along the way, we have grown tired of being perfect.  Or, rather, seeming perfect.  We were never any good to begin with.  And although we should have been stronger, should have tried harder, should have been a person instead of a shell of a person, we all just want a friend. 

     And that's what starving is: a friend.  For the rest of your life, you will never find another person who is so wholly concerned with you and only you.  Starving tears at our body and pollutes our mind, but a friend is a friend. 

    
    

All the Sad Things

Parents worry about their children watching violent films, playing violent games, in fear that their child may grow up to be timid and scared of a world that is now unrecognizable. 

     Yet, they don't think about the effects of all the sad songs, and the sad movies, and the sad books, and how those tragedies can take possession of a child's mind. 

     We destroy our lives before they even begin. 

     We are like clay in the hands of a world that is cruel and unyielding.  We are like puppets, dolls, servants in the hands of world that doesn't even know our names. 

     Most people live their lives in a state of starvation, always searching for that one thing that is always, always missing.   

     And I am no different. 

Such a Tragic Thing

It's a tragic thing, to be ready to die at such a young age. 

Eyesore

 

There is such an ugly thing in the reflection.

     Stares at me with hollow eyes and sunken cheekbones.  She is departed, cold, and so very hollow.  Like a colorless painting.  A painting that has the potential to be a work of art, but is instead a whisper of what could be, a ruined version of what should be. 

    My vision of perfection is cruel, and I have played the fool all along.  The expectations of my daydreams bury me.  Why, oh why, do I do this to myself? 

     How did I go so wrong in life?

Monsters

I wish I could go back and tell little me,

A big kid is not something you want to be.

The monsters that used to live under your bed,

Have moved, and now live inside your head. 

The monsters tell you you're not good enough,

The monsters are what force you to starve and cut.

But the biggest difference between the two,

Is the ones in your head can actually hurt you.