Toxic Lover Pt. 1 (Poem)

This week's piece is a two-part poem written to show truth and vulnerability in a season many of us suffer through.

I lay in the echo of a dropping pin 

Wearing you like a weighted blanket 

You sink me deeper into you

Than this bottomless mattress 

Greys and blacks suffocate my pupils 

So long that the absence of color 

Is as familiar as the absence of light  

Bright light

Dim the screen so I can keep scrolling 

And bare witness to all the evidence that proves

You are a comfortable lie 

What I need 

Is what I don’t want 

What I want

Is what I don’t have 

But they have 

Because they did 

Because they do

Because they are 

And I am not

Because I am nothing 

Their lies are beautiful

I mean their lives are beautiful 

And mine are true 

Even when I don’t want to believe you

Or trust you

You remind me every time I try to 

Remove you 

That nothing is my portion

Staggered breaths escaping my torso 

As I twist to lift this mass 

Of my life upright 

To believe I can breathe a breath

That doesn’t have you in it 

Every time I inhale 

I am smacked with the stench of failure 

More potent than my decision to make this

My seventh day without showering 

Why make myself clean when 

I shouldn’t even exist to be seen 

You tell me all the time 

That no one cares 

I try to stand, I do 

Each toe presses firmly 

Into the floor boards

With more hope in finding a firm foundation 

Under my feet than in my soul 

But I stand 

I stand because I’m trying to prove

I don’t need you

I can live without you

I can live 

I can…

One foot limps in front of the other 

I’m doing it

I’m attempting to escape 

The blacks and grays of the 

Confinement you beat me into needing 

This room

I don’t need this room

Freedom longs for me

But you make me solve your riddles

For my survival 

Only to tell me I’m not smart enough to do so 

So back I turn

Hopelessness settles into bosom

And the faith of my victory left 

To linger outside my bedroom door…