I am still angry. My therapist said its okay to still be angry, that I reserve the right to be. I never learned how to feel anger the right way...I only become reminded of my father slamming the front door and the soft sobs as my mother begs him to calm down. Anger is often justified, but where the **** do I put it? I am not my father. Even though I'd like to I can't scream at you and I can't slam a door on what you did to me. Even though I'd like to I can't go back and stop your hand from hitting me across the face, I can't kick and scream until you got off of me. You're not my father but you were so much worse. You never showed anger, you only pinned me down with your words, and with your disgustingly muscular arms. You left me crying quietly in your bathroom while I try to cover up what you had done to me. You made me never want to leave because you were the world, and I'd be dead without the world. Well, I didn't die. I became addicted to the rattling of a pill canister and I shed the weight you put on me in only a few weeks. But you left me kicking and screaming inside. And I am still angry.

You think I ain't real
But what do you know
I will haunt you I
Am what you call
A shadow of your
Former self I will
Keep playing the things
That had happened to
You in your past life
I am called your fears
I will keep giving you
Fears of your past
In your present life
I will not stop I
Will keep going until
You go insane with
Feeling that something
Is watching you
I am called the board
Of knowledge or known
As the spirit board
The Ouija board

Sometimes I whisper the words, “Are you okay?” into the empty air I breathe just to hear what it would be like to feel someone care, but who am I to change the convention of the polite and smiling reply of, “I’m good. How are you?” Would anyone really know how to react if I actually said that it depends on the day you ask me?

The truth is,
today
I’m not okay.

I don’t know what I will get each time the… (I would say the sunlight opens my eyelids, but let’s be real here; I don’t really sleep anymore.)… I know why this happened to me the first time, but now? Maybe it’s because I learned how to feel again. I guess depression doesn’t really need a reason, though, does it? At the very least there is a big difference between now and seven years ago.

This time, I know my worth. This time, I’m fighting back, instead of drowning in it. This time, I am strong. And this time… I don’t want to die.

This time, I am actually reaching out for a hand to silently hold mine just to comfort me for even a minute. The only problem is everyone else has a life too. People love to say, “I’m here for you,” and, "I’m praying for you,” but they are too busy to actually to that.

Every day I get up just before the crack of dawn to lace my running shoes and pump my legs long enough to replace the stale state of my lungs to something fresh and clean. It’s the one thing I feel I have control over in my life.  It’s my chance to get out and feel like I’m a part of the world before the rest of the world wakes up and reminds me that I’m just a tiny piece of it.

For most of my life, I’ve felt like I am the missing piece to a puzzle that I can’t find. I’ve always felt different in a way I don’t know how to put into words. It’s just a sense of myself I don’t feel I need to explain. Not long ago, that feeling started to go away, but I think God may have misplaced me when he tried to fit my pieces together.

There’s a silver castle on my way to freedom, but I can never quite reach it, and there’s a silence that swallows me whole each time I steal a glance in its direction. Today, I am not okay. Tonight, I just pray that the next time my feet step out of bed and onto the soft carpet of the home I finally found for myself, I will feel a little bit better.

I suppose that’s all I can ask for at this point.

I want one moment
in my life,
I can look back on,
and know for certain
that without me
it would have never
existed.
One moment which
lives on in the memories
of my friends and I as
irreplaceable because of my
being there,
I want to live on like a picture
in frame.