You do not understand me.

You do not understand the darkness that roils inside my mouth
and leaves the taste of ink upon my tongue.
You do not understand the flames
that act as chains inside my wrists and around my lungs.

I cannot speak to you,
because when you see a car accident,
you don’t wish you were a part of it.
I am drowning here.
And while it is easy to say that you can sympathize,
you do not have death welling up inside your chest,
you are not rotting away piece by piece,
hand by arm by body by mind.

You may feel the darkness brush against your skin,
but it does not permeate your being.
I wish that this never ending emptiness would end,
that some part of me that controls the white light of tomorrow,
that decides when ‘it gets better’,
will finally activate and rip me out of this perdition.
I am burning up here.
I cannot see your outstretched hands through the fire,
and your words are just muffled chaos.

I am falling here.
Gravity has shifted against me,
and has sent everything I have ever known into a freefall.
I want to grab on,
I want to grow wings and pull myself from the edge,
but my hand is pulling that trigger regardless of my wants,
because monsters and men are two different species,
and being both will tear me apart.

I just want to feel something,
that isn’t the end of a bridge.
I just want to feel something,
that isn’t an empty bottle of pills.

I just want to feel something.

Anything.

Time is not fluid in motion.
It is more like a loop machine.

My five year old self playing soldiers with my brother beats like a bass drum.
My seven year old self watching my dad almost kill my mom glitches like a guitar.
My eleven year old self feeling the pains of his peers for the first time hums a tune.
My fifteen year old self feeling love after horror makes it all stop.

These are all Checkpoints, coalescing together into a froth of pain and joy.
Sadness.
Anger.

My past is shouting in my head with a voice like a thunderstorm,
across the vast sea of time that sits like the water reservoirs on the mountains behind my home in case there is a fire.
My words are the pressure release valve on this steam room of eternity.
So when I speak, yes, it is me who is speaking.
But my body, my vessel, will sometimes spit history.
Say something I no longer believe.

Showcasing the way I will never truly grow up,
Showing how none of us will ever be free of the things that shaped us.

I’m sorry.

I see this in those I love.
My mom keeps a distance because she was stabbed in the heart by the absence of my sisters.
My brother looks in the mirror so that he can attach his mask in all the right spots to hide the scars from when he was in middle school.

We are all 5, 7, 11, 15, 18.
We are every age we have ever been,
We are constantly falling off of our bikes,
Or breaking a glass on the floor,
Or scraping our knee on the pavement,
Or falling in love.

We are just vessels through which time passes.
We are a mouthpiece, a receptacle that bleeds our stories out
and displays our stories like vintage paintings of the past.

We must look back with trepidation, and longing,
for the future is surely as complex and amazing,
but the past is who we are.