my fingers are bleeding from writing words that i never
meant and my throat is sore from the words that i never spoke
and nothing ever seems to take up any space my mind is now
just a landscape of thoughts i never wanted to think and
flowers that seem to always wilt
//
if i were to count the scars that line my body,
that number would be sixteen
sixteen years of being misunderstood sixteen
years of not knowing the difference between bad
and good sixteen packs of cigarettes in sixteen
different months i turned sixteen last week
and a storm called insecurity was by my side
and it continues to rain
//
the cord from the phone hangs aimlessly and the kitchen
sink overflows with water that i should turn off
but there are a number of things that i should do that i
don't there are a number of things that should haunt me
but instead they choke me into believing i am okay when
i never am and i do not know if i prefer burning alive
or drowning anymore i do not know if i prefer the
suffocating sound of silence or the deathly drum of your
voice in my head anymore because either way i am
a basket case and i try to run away from things i cannot escape
so i let anxiety swallow me whole and find consolation
in being semi automatic  


(h.l.)

Here is one of the truest things I have found in my few years of life: nothing is ever how you expect it to be.
You can imagine what your life will look like
a year in the future and you'll always get it wrong.
You can't even predict the way things are going to be tomorrow.
Buildings could fall, bombs could explode.
Heart attacks might happen too (in more ways than one).
In the blink of an eye you're sitting in a hospital room
waiting for somebody who isn't going to come out.
Or, tomorrow's events could be far more subtle.
Your life tends to start changing when you're not looking.
One day you wake up and you realize you have a dream,
a dream you've been hiding in your heart for a long time.
Or maybe you're happy and then one day before you know it
you're believing what other people say,
and you're wondering if you're important, if you're loved
and you think you don't belong
and those questions wind themselves around your heart
and loop in your head like a broken record
until you're eyes have gotten so adjusted to the shadows
that you've forgotten what it's like to breathe in the light.
But happy things can come without expecting them, too.
One day it's June and you're gripping the arm rest of your plane seat
looking at stars out the window when a month ago
you could never have imagined feeling something this beautiful.
And you land and everything changes.
Or maybe one day it's August, and your mom calls you outside
and there's a boy standing there and you don't know his name yet
and you definitely don't know how when you're sixteen
it is so easy to come up with beautiful ideas about the future
when the future in your head will in fact probably never happen.
But you know this already at sixteen,
and you'll believe it still when you're sixty:
there is nothing as dangerous as pretending not to care
and there is nothing so easy as wasting time
when time is just running and running and running out.