amaliene

[amaliene]

4 am and for the first time in months I can feel an emotion large enough to feel through my whole body. Head to toe.

I feel so lonely, but I'm hugging it tightly because at least it's something I can really fully feel.

[amaliene]

I miss hell. At least there, no one suffered alone.

[amaliene]

I miss when we were young and stayed up half the week keeping each other company chasing away the dark. Just a text away.

None of us talk anymore.

I'd give anything to have that again. Someone to cling to while the walls caved in.

[amaliene]

It's been 10 years since the first and only time I fell in love. Real, all-consuming, comforted by their scent and giggled when they made you coffee and glad to be alive at the same time they are love.

I spent all the love I had on just one person. And now I have nothing left to give anymore.

[amaliene]

I wish I could actually fall in love, but the best I can do is play an actor on a stage. Play pretend like one does as a child. I wish I could do more than delude myself into thinking the feelings are real. But they'll never be real, no matter how much I want them to be.

Sometimes it's nice to pretend I'm not a failure of a person though, if only for a little while.

[amaliene]

I want to take comfort in the tales of my elders. I want to believe that I can work hard, be smart, and get by like they did. That my fears and anxieties can serve as my guide, not my puppeteer, and that I will find housing and income stability. But things are so different compared to then and now, that every story of success and survival sounds like whimsical pipedreams. Now more than ever, I fear nothing so much as I fear tomorrow. As I fear the future. The state of life in my country has gotten so bad. And it is not as bad as other places, but still I cannot see how to survive or escape this economic hell. No one can afford houses without hanging themselves with debt. No one can find work that will not tie the noose for them and squeeze them for the last penny in their pocket. How much longer until the future holds better opportunities for life and stability for us who were not trust fund babies? It feels longer and longer each day. Living in such a place feels like a curse.

[amaliene]

It's so funny how phrasing your selfharm a certain way makes others supportive of it. Others will support your misery when you use the right words.

[amaliene]

There is something wrong with me, but I don't know what it is. I used to feel such joy when I crafted stories. Built worlds with my bare hands. Painted pictures on a page with letters and fonts. I had so much energy, so much drive, even as the world around me died batch by batch.

Why did I only feel alive when the world was ending? Why don't I feel better now?

I think I might be sick.

[amaliene]

[amaliene]

It's so easy for you to say encouraging words. You're already good at the thing. You were always good at the thing. You don't know what it's like to look at your handiwork and know it is only full of flaws. Your high horse has blinded you to what it's like to struggle. To try and try and try again and constantly fall short of the mark. If your work looked like mine, I wonder if those pretty, empty words would still come so easily to you. Or, I wonder, if you would hate your work too.

[amaliene]

I never understood poetry until I learned how to recognize and sit with my feelings. Because sometimes there are feelings, vibes, atmospheres, whatever you'd like to call them, that prose cannot describe in a way that captures them. The word 'nostalgia' does not fully display the way my heart is weight down by the emptiness the past left

Or the yerning my soul feels

Reaching out with bruised and battered hands

Grasping despite the pain of thorns

For the sliver of hope that despite all the bad

All the awful that came from the back then

Maybe there was something

Anything, no matter how small

Worth living for.

Sometimes poetry lets you spill your guts onto the page in an unpalatable way. A way that prose cannot keep tidy or neat. Poetry is messy. It's vulgar. It's nonsensical, sometimes even to its author. But poetry? Is human.

[amaliene]

Sometimes I think I'm recovering and then I realize I was only ever distracting myself from my own hollowness. But without those distractions, I'm left as just the shell of a person who never really existed as their whole self to begin with. I've been running from my own mind for so long, I don't think I ever learned who I was without these heavy feelings. And how long until I erase this moment, and return to believing such dark thoughts are behind me?

[amaliene]

If the end justifies the means, tell me how your kingdom of ash tastes? How clear does the water of your river run, now that your bridges have burned above it? Does your sword of doubled edge still serve you in battle, when your swings plunge it into your flesh?

[amaliene]

You call it holding a grudge, I call it protecting myself from trusting you with deeply personal charged information.

[amaliene]

I am truly weak. I tell myself that I must let go. That I must keep distance. And then the one I must distance myself from runs into trouble, and I come running. I do not think I am in love. I think I am ensnared. And yet it is the only way I find myself breathing.

[amaliene]

Sometimes something, usually a song, will remind me of back then. Of simpler times. Of when I had shelter from it all. And I'm reminded that I would do anything to have that back. And I'm reminded that it's never coming back. And it's gone because of me.

[amaliene]

The skin of my wrists itches to be broken. My veins beg to be opened. It is strange the way this happens, seeing as my wrists were never a spot I chose to split. They beg nonetheless.