The Never Ending Poem

When I was a child, I read book after book about the holocausts. About genocides. I couldn’t wrap my head around humanity. Or… inhumanity. I thought if I knew sad things, that was a reason to be sad. Instead of just… being sad.

I felt like a sieve, and sadness was pebbles and happiness was water, so maybe that's why I’m happy when I swim. Because an empty container isn’t empty when it’s underneath the water.

And now I leave a trail of coins behind me because they fall out of my wallet but I don’t bother to pick them up because I want to believe they’re good luck for somebody. Even though I know in two weeks, I’ll be wishing I had just 5 more cents.

And I hate sweating. I keep my room cold at night. So cold it wakes me up, but that's okay because who likes sleep anyways?

When I sleep, I get scared I’ll never wake up. When I wake up I get scared because I’m not sleeping anymore. I hate striking up conversations and yet I feel so alone. I think it’s coded into my DNA that I must be made of contradictions.

I say sorry too much. I say sorry too much. I say sorry so much, the word starts to sound wrong, stars to sound like a song, starts to sound like the night sky, like stars. I love the idea of stars, but not like in science, I like the way stars look when little kids draw them because five points is as much universe as I can muster up some days.

I remember standing in the wind on the porch and thinking I was dying because the wind rushed down my throat so fast I couldn’t breathe it back out, but I didn’t mind dry drowning. I told my dad once, and he just laughed. There's a seed of anger in my heart. I know I shouldn’t plant it and shouldn’t let it fester, shouldn’t let it grow, but how do I dig it out without clawing into my own sacred ground?

I know broken people aren’t born broken, and yet I can’t remember the day I shattered. Maybe it happened gradually and only as the light leaked through did I begin to notice. Do you ever look at the moon and conceptualize it’s creation? Or realize that if you twitch your hands in just the right way, they start to look like spiders?Because I do. I pick at skin like ghosts and hope to see phantoms.

I have never been a bright one. Instead, I glow like the moon- a surface reflecting light, a thing in constant orbit. And if I could burn all of the mirrors in the world, I would. I’d melt them into glass and tint them rose colored.

I’ve spent so much of my life shrinking, or melting, like the candles in a menorah, candles that are quite literally meant to burn out, and so I feel like I am racing against the light.But I was never a runner. All I did was sprint. I had bursts in which I was lighting but they always left me out of breath, and now all they’ve left me with is a sense of death. Now, in my dreamings, I’m always running, but it’s never anywhere, it’s only out of time.

I believe in fairytales more than I believe in god, and I believe in god more than I believe in myself. I know what self hatred feels like. I wear it like a coat. It’s too sizes too small, and doesn’t fit quite right but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.

I sing too much, too loudly. I sing even when I don’t realize I’m singing and then, when I catch myself, I don’t stop. Maybe because I’m writing a musical into my life. More likely because I’m scared of what will happen when I stop. I’m not shy, I’m just terrified.

And I learned when I was younger that you can hide behind the brightest smile, because sometimes, when your world is made of light, it's the shadow that sticks out. I only feel small when I’m thinking, because my thoughts are so big and so deep, I don’t think anything will ever be able to hold them, except for maybe paper- a single lifeboat trying to save a country, trying to save a world, trying to save my universe.

I am a repetition. I am a repetition, which makes me think I may be insanity. I learned to cry without smudging my makeup, I learned to say I’m tired. I started taking in words because I was never taking in blows. I learned to let them sink much deeper than scars ever could.

I don’t like this about myself. I don’t stop.

I know I shouldn’t feel alone. Know I have so much love in my life. But when you do nothing all day but go over every little thing you’ve ever said, it becomes impossible to explain your own existence. It is like handing someone a cup of salt water and calling it the ocean. They say turn on a light, but they do not understand that fluorescence is not the same as daylight. I hold on too tightly, then wonder why I have rope burn. I know that picking at scabs will leave scars, but I prefer some kind of proof that I went through pain.

My hands are always shaking, but it’s only when someone is yelling at me, yelling through me, yelling at the parts of my sound I fought like hell to cultivate that I find myself go still, like a movie put on pause, and it’s in those moments, my voice does not waver. I’d like to think my grandfather could be proud of that.

Everyday I am haunted by the questions I’ve never asked. Questions that went unsaid because I had been too busy trying to learn to love the sound of my own voice.

I needed to believe it was a chance to be. A chance to try, to fight to suffer. I needed proof that I was here. That I went through something…. Because at the end of the day, we are made of stardust.

We’ve been through and survived the world's creation. That is a big thought. And if I can carry such big thoughts, and write them down, then I can carry the weight of my own world.