Everywhere I look, there's an emptiness
where you’re supposed to be.
I told the doctors how I see nothing in everything,
so they prescribed pills to help me see.

My room is always so cold
but your breath was so hot.
I told the doctors I still feel it on my neck
so they gave me more pills to make it stop.

I took the pills for years
but they haven’t helped at all
So I stopped the prescriptions
and started my downward fall.

The doctors will never fully understand
that I will always look for you everywhere I go.
Antidepressants and mood stabilizers are making my mind a
bomb, ready to blow.

Mood stabilizers, they call them, but in some ways, they're more like painkillers for your heart. They numb the feelings so that you don't have the extreme moods you are accustomed to.

When you have a mood disorder, everything you feel is so much more intense, and so much more certainly snowballs out of control. That's most of the problem; the complete lack of control you have over your chaotic emotions.

But then you go to a doctor, and they give you happy little pills called stabilizers to do just as they're told to. Stabilize you. Normalize you.

Funny thing is, even with the little heart painkillers, you'll never be normal. Even if you keep up a fantastically ordinary facade, you will never be ordinary. You will always have those little pills in your pocket telling you that you are not good enough the way you are, that you must change.

Its a double-edged sword, these pills. Because some days you wonder why you can't just be you, why do you need these drugs in your veins, but then you remember the cuts on your arms and the painful nights where you drowned in your own tears and you remember why even you don't think the person you are is acceptable. Get better, Grace, be better, Grace. The words pound in your ears until you forget who you used to be and you are always striving to be something more, something better. You strive until it kills you.

You are stronger, you can beat it, they say.

What if I don't want to beat it, though, just want to have control of it? I never want to feel less than everything, I never want to feel so dull and numb that it kills me more than the pain ever did, I never want to beat myself, I simply want to be me but controllable.

Because right now I'm uncontrollable and that's terrifying.

Painkillers for your heart, numbing you until you can't feel anymore. But sometimes I wonder if I really want to feel numb.

Do I want to be me, or who everyone wants me to be?

One is safer than the other, but which one is really living?

Because all I want is to feel alive, but I don't know whether surviving will entail that.

Painkillers or killer pain.

That is my decision, one I'm not ready to make. Maybe tomorrow, when mania is not so close to my throat.

Maybe tomorrow, because I am far too afraid of today.

I swear I do not refrain my heart from its passion.
There was only one goal, to live as a quiet bastion.
No, not a drop of my mortality shall be leaked in fray.
Eyes will burrow, teeth will testify, my flaws, in disarray.
Yes, there was an attempt to control even the sheen of my glee.
The standards, statutes, stabilizers, and sticks I used to **** me...
****, prop, and stop any step, if the path was warm,
For that feeling meant change, and quite possibly harm.
"Why?" the question may arise, "live with such chill?"
Well, my beloved, only a loss constitutes a win, or a thrill.
At least this was my moral, as a child with no plan.
To live as man says he should, and can.
I have tried to uphold that life like a beat
Then life chimes, "To eat is to **** and to live is to eat."
Listen...

The applause's approval drowns my research in cacophony...
Whenever my stones start to slip, please run from me.

Being who I am I get obsessive. I get paranoid. I get utterly, shamefully, afraid. I lie. I lie a lot, even when I don't mean to or even when I don't realize it. The moods are like different people taking the reins, and they hardly acknowledge one another's actions. Happiness can do  thousand wonderful things that sadness will never remember. Mania will think a thousand thoughts stability can never fathom even pondering.

But I guess I'm getting off track. This isn't a movie about my head. Its a tale about my drugs, my loves, and my heart.

Its funny, trading drugs that stop you from suicide to drugs that stop your body from doing just that, but this time without your permission. At least let me say its ok before self-destructing, systems. Have some common decency before sinking the ship.

Even funnier, though, is now that my lungs stopped trying to **** me, my head totally decided it was time to take that title back for itself. Funniest has to be, though, is that my worst drugs aren't even the ones I pump into my bloodstream.

With the mood meds, I also stopped taking creativity and honesty and responsibility and ambition. Goodness has it been a messy den of deception I've been nesting in for the past month. This is the first time I've really written clearly what I've been thinking since I thought I was dying. Oh, sure, there was the one time I stopped breathing, but if I wasn't breathing I obviously thought I was still dying.

I guess its really today when I take a step outside my own vanity project and look at the mess I've made. I've done nothing, been nothing, but utter horror since I got out of that hospital. I've been a terrible girlfriend, student, daughter, and friend this entire time. I shut myself away, only exposing myself to those who I had to as to not raise suspicion. Hell, I've basically acted like a class act villain, hiding away in my lair plotting and thinking while ultimately accomplishing nothing. That's what villains do, right? Lonely, misunderstood, ultimately alone people who do not see the light the way the rest of society does ultimately never win, don't they?

I was someone, months ago. I had dreams, I had friends, I had a life. Now all I have is the shadows of my family and a boyfriend who I have done nothing to deserve this past month. But I guess the darkness has gobbled me up like a yummy cake and left me an ugly, unlikable crumb of my former self.

Time to **** it the **** up. Everything hurts, everything's broken, everything;s wrong. I don't have my drugs. I don't have the endless love I once had in my heart. I'm not the girl who once spent every day with her friends, called her mom three times a week, always excelled in class, and cried when she had to let it go.

Be honest with yourself, Grace. The true thing that's killing you is that you are empty. You do not care. You worry about your lies for the self-preservation tactic of not getting caught being the bad guy, but you are. You don't know if its a mental coping mechanism to deal with the torrential emotions or a survival tactic or for the sick selfishness of not wanting to feel anymore. You feign it, affection and love, but you can only muster it out in goofiness and weak "I love you"s.

Go back to your drugs, little girl. You're only strong with a security blanket. Otherwise you're a bitter ***** with a talent for lying. Get your mood stabilizers and your expressions and your friends and your hope back. Cynicism cannot keep them from you forever, unless it truly wants to **** you.

But that would ruin the lies of how fine you are, wouldn't it?

Make it ok, make your heart ok, and finally then it will be ok to lie just a little bit, maybe just to protect yourself from realizing this heartlessness, this period of nothing, was actually real. Go back to Wonderland, Grace. It missed you.

Maybe just as much as you missed it.

"What tempature does love freeze?" asked
a five year old ice scientist.
Her character sheet read: "Mage".
She preferred "Scientist".

"An Ice Scientist can freeze anything!" We said.
"How cold?".
"-300 degrees Celcius".
"-300 degrees Celcius".
The Ice Scientist spent
Dungeons and Dragons
and the entire next Year
asking us the Freezing point
of  EVERYTHING!

"I want to stop the Bard by
freezing the Queens love"

"Roll for it".

"Nat 20".

"The Queens love freezes
As she refuses the bards advances".

"YES! ...Wait,
What tempature?"

"70 degrees,"
"love can freeze at any tempature".

The adults burst into laughter.
The Ice Scientist smiled,
gleefully ignorant.

I fell silent.

At 211.5 Degrees Celsius, Adrenaline Freezes.
Did you know that?
Your heart stops racing,
No more sweat, dry mouth.
The initial fight or flight reaction slows.
you see less red.

Mom stopped buying Epi-pens;
they're only sold in packs of two,
said she's "Boycotting epinephrines codependency".

Adrenaline helps your heart beat!
Did you know that?

At 128 degrees celcius Dopamine freezes.
Did you know that?
With desire frozen and no sense of reward
you sleep more, eat more,
slip into depression.
You aren't addicted to anything anymore!
unmotivated!
upperless!

Mom gave up coffee,
gave up chocolate,
can't even have ***.

Dopamine makes you happy!
Did you know that?

At 121 degrees celsius, serotonin freezes.
Your well-being crackles on a car window.
The remaining strands of happiness,
form icicles!
You can't regulate your mood,
or appetite, or sleep patterns,
you are unpredictable and sick!
Serotonin heals wounds,
did you know that?
with it frozen, the scars you've collected
stay open!

At 0 degrees celcius water freezes!
you are made of 50-60% water!
half of your body is FROZEN at 0 degrees!
Did you know that?

At -2 degrees celcius human blood freezes.
Your hands go numb,
like when you have no gloves on?
Then your toes!
Arms!
legs!

"I think I would like the numb feeling"
"being frozen, like Elsa".
All those tingles are the blood
warming up and moving around.
Did you know that?

"No, I didn't know any that."

At -218.8 degrees celcius, oxygen freezes.
Breathes winter trees
into glass ornaments.
Each panic attack, a frozen lung.
A car exaust pipe duct taped inside your back window.
A crowbar against it attached to a friend
A friend who saves your life.
Without oxygen you turn purple.
Did you know that?

Dear Ice Scientist.
There is a cryogenic chamber
deep in my heart where you have slept
like that queens love,
set to thaw with an oven timer.
While you rest
I will set fire to the blankets you've used
like in-scents, prayer candles.
Taste you hot in my lungs
like cigarette smoke
if not for long, for memorial.
Your afgans burned to ashes.
Each night I still cover myself in them,
pull them over my head,
rub them into my eyes,
swallow them every morning
like vitamins, or mood - stabilizers
because as frozen as the
blood,
oxygen,
water in my body is,
your memories were cremated.
My addiction to you is cryogenic.
Walt disney won't bring you back to me,
you are no hologram.
I will be cold.
I will die in this winter
I know falling though thin ice
is just drowning
which is no different from a frozen lung,
frozen heart.
How am I to pull farther away
when death is as close to me
as any other flurry?

"Mama, what's the tempature?"
"I'm busy".
"Dada, what's the tempature?"
"Well, Inside or outside?"
"Outside?"
"Well it's five below freezing outside".
"Inside".
"In here? Well, it's 70 degrees".

Doctor help me
give me the pill
the prescription
the fix it all
I’ll buy into the system
just take away the feeling
the shrink he says somethings wrong with me
its my brain
please Doctor
I’m begging  
scam me
give me the drug
the prescription
the fix it all
make me numb
and you could be numb too
we all have a problem
we all have a disorder
we are all bipolar, attention deficit, borderline or depressed
you see there is a name for your problems and a pill that can solve them
now you're hooked too huh?
now you buy into the system
its an ugly addiction
we’re all addicted to the high
addicted to the ****** the Lithium the Prozac
the antidepressants and the mood stabilizers
we all live and breath the fix it all system
over diagnosed zombies
lacking responsibility we beg
Doctor help me
tell me somethings wrong with me
tell me its not my fault
tell me you will give me my fix it all

Drama queen dreams
have been restructured
by good therapy

which has exposed
how close I was
to practicing popping.

Stabilizers expected
to shorten the time
between hurt and healing.

She said a week
or 2 is enough
time to try again.

Scared straight sane
by the threat
of a prescription

and the visual
of the structure
of my categories.

Troubled by realizations
of not loving them all
as much as some others.

I say "I Love You"
more to them
than some family

hear it from me.
Loved, they should Be.
Revision in progess.

It is my work
since it takes much
longer to sink in.

Real love is constant.
I've experienced pain
then emotionally reneged

when a higher love
was due and within
my giving power.

Make a decision,
she said. I am
reading the lines

instead of marking
my dreams between them.
I flip closing pages

while a tilted can
revives a life, once,
wilted in my hands.

tachyphylaxis - tach·y·phy·lax·is (tāk'ə-fĭ-lāk'sĭs)  n.
1.    A rapidly decreasing response to pleasure following initial administration.

I didn’t know this
demon had a name.
Ugly as it is it fits,
a random mish-mash
of unpleasant sounds
and equal unpleasantness
felt.

I’ve known the *******
forever, manifest in vitamin cures
and psychological processes,
SSRI’s and stabilizers.

He attends to the end of
affectionate loving and all
the designer vacations
you've ever taken.

He is the golden handcuffs of
square foot home ownership
and his business cards are
set in silver.

To put it bluntly
his continuous presence
is intent on destruction
of any contentment.

He is all things along the way
that appear so promising at first
but never last.

Synonymous with tolerance,
antonymous with precedence,


the antagonistic leaven of all living.

Why is my heart tight
From a 7 letter word

A 7 letter word
From 2 years ago

My stomach is twisting
My head is spinning
I feel the self hate

Pathetic little girl
Letting the pain come back
A 7 letter word
Is all it took

So pathetic
To let it bring the hurt back

You're supposed to be better
To put it in a grave
And let it die instead of you

But here I am
Sharp pains of guilt
And shame

My body feels weak
Heavy like lead
From a simple 7 letter word

I can feel the numb return
I can feel the pain again

A trigger

A stupid 7 letter word
Is a trigger for me

It awakens the beast
And it reminds me
How close I always am
To falling back into the grips
Of the monster inside

No matter how drugged I am
With antidepressants
And mood stabilizers
That 7 letter word
Brings back the pain
The numb
The memories of 2 years ago

Memories of Roger's Memorial
Of the fear
Of the hate

They come rushing back
Because of a 7 letter word
That has affected so many

A 7 letter word
That once had no meaning to me
But now terrifies me

A 7 letter word
A simple 7 letter word

*Suicide

she wears her hospital bracelets like jewelry
to cover the scars that adorn her like
red-inked tattoos.
she pops pills like soda tabs
ignoring the dangers of overdosing
on caffeine highs and the sickly
sweetness of sugar.
she cannot recall the last time she didn't
wash her
antidepressants
anxiety meds
sleeping pills
mood stabilizers
down with alcohol in the hopes
someone would notice the heavy imbalance
wasn't just in her head.
she hasn't believed in god since
she crept downstairs on her ninth birthday
to stare at her reflection in the kitchen knives
and didn't see Him staring back at her.
there was nobody telling her to go
back to bed.
she hasn't gotten on her knees for
anything holy since she started
inflicting pain upon herself;
leaving traces of sadness on
her ribcage
her wrists
her thighs
her stomach
her hips.
she has been living in a grave
and her thoughts never stop playing hide and seek
she only ever searches
at the bottom of a lake
or if they're mixed in with the stones in her pockets
or hiding under the train tracks near her house.

When I have so much of no feeling
that it turns into apathy, I’m told
to believe that it’s my mental health
playing tricks on me again. But what
if this is just who I’m destined to be?
No one wants to figure out what’s
wrong with me, so they feed me
antidepressants, antipsychotics,
anxiety medication, and mood
stabilizers until I stop complaining.
What if they’re just shutting me out?
Like the ocean pulling back, my eyes
are reaching out for help. If you
can’t be that, all you see is the
empty waters. What’s really there
is all of the casualties of the storm.

Thirsting for lost childhood.
Oh to play on a bicycle with stabilizers.
Hung on to by a daddy who pretended he cared.
To stick stamps in an album, with such tender care.
To create towns full of plastic houses complete with minute plastic men.
Without responsibilities.
Plastic kids and Barbie dolls, are buckets much less hassle
To squabble with a brother, with whom you squabble still.

To have no dependents, my goodness what a dream.
It was no dream.
Not the slightest hint of fantasy.
I have more, so much more.
They may have  depended on me for years, but now when the chips are down.
They lifted and supported me through all life's peaks and troughs.
They are closer to me than I ever thought they would be.
Nowadays I'm glad to say I'm not that little kid!
(C) Livvi

my darling is like most
and does not understand.
He believes
because our trials are different
that I do not struggle the same.
He does not see
my desperate battle to crack a smile,
only another mood swing.
He does not understand
how hard it is
to throw 18 traumatized years away
and pretend it never happened.
He sees twelve hours sleep
excessive and lazy
because he cannot understand
how one can be so sad
they cannot get out of bed.
He can worry
about clean hands
and crumbs
but the millions of worries
that send me sprawling
to sharp breaths
and tears
are inconceivable.
My darling is always level headed
calm cool and collected
and is unaware of my days.
I spend all day
doing what I can
to make sure he is happy,
I avoid the mirror
for a glimpse
summons waterfalls
I take mood stabilizers
exercise
and eat well
but most days
I walk around the house like a zombie
in despair because he,
like most everyone,
will never understand how hard it is,
the weight on my chest
the constant tears
the black dog
the ball and chain
the panic
the fear
all the little things
I struggle through
everyday,
the daily war I wage with myself
the never ending hell
the bravery
and strength I have
to admit I need help
and speak my troubles
to one I trust,
my hours of hard work
are not spent at a paid job
but trying to love and live and breath
and smile and be healthy
for I've got a long way to go
and it will take a long time, but,
my darling does not see this
and is now
no longer my darling.

*****
Mood stabilizers
Anti-psychotics
Xanax
Silence never felt to heavy

Just don't stop coward
Write what's in your heart
Like a doe leaping over fences
Entrails, somehow it fits
Snow on the lawn in Texas
A ****** salt nose dripping on lips
A first kiss in a creek surrounded by mule deer

Two spaces between each empty place
How do they get their names on
The **** bottle

Sitting on Orchard road, in front of the towers
Waiting for a friend or two
The six pack turning warm in its plastic bag
Taking sips under an umbrella in the rain
Espresso and Guinness
**** me for trying

With every flick of light
I grow dimmer and dimmer.
Memory tarnished with burn holes
of a grown sinner and I’m scared.

Seeing spots of expired clarity,
I’ll keep numbness at my fingertips.
Insomniacs get more sleep,
so I skip every therapy trip.

Cope with no hope of recovery,
but scarf the midnight stabilizers.
Better days will never stay
when you’re a self loathing sympathizer.