Midnight Thoughts

I'm not sure who I am these days except a bundle of questions and dreams. I'm closer to thirty than twenty, which in many eyes is still young, and yet I feel like I've lived lifetime after lifetime, and still, not lived quite enough. I'm tired. The kind of tired that sits so heavy in your bones it keeps you from falling asleep. Does everyone feel this way? Sticky with sweetness? Sick with hope? Muddied, unfinished, closer than ever before to death?

A feverish longing to live, truly live, gallivants through my chest, but the grip of fear and the scarring of time keep the good things tethered out of sight. I hear them singing a song for the person I could become. I listen and their eagerness makes me cry. Is it too late? Have I gone too far...? I'd like to believe I'm only just beginning, but I worry my teeth will fall out before that ever-elusive self finds her voice. Seems like a silly fear, but it's true.

What if I disintegrate before I become... me?

I started self-destructing when I was 12 to escape the fear. A few swipes of a razor blade across my wrist and skipping lunch to feel my body ache. It felt safer to be the one to sully myself before the world ever could. But now that I've been sullied, I must come to terms with the harm I've caused. I still forget meals out of habit and have to force myself to eat. My teeth are stained from too many cigarettes and my spine is bent painfully around my suffocated heart. I can't run the way I used to, sleep without mind tremors, or move without bumping into something I thought I'd long overcome. I'm afraid of growing older and ashamed to be afraid. I don't recognize my weakness but cannot deny the brittle nature of muscles tensed far too long. I am not myself, and I am undeniably me all the same. I disagree with who I've become and yet rejoice in how much I've grown. How is that possible? How can I love what I also despise?

I look at 12-year-olds now, so young and malleable, so hopeful and confused, and I wonder how many of them will make it out alive? How many of them will hold onto the passion that burns their throats as they speak? The playfulness that glows like a target on their back? The dreams that ask them to defy gravity and tribe? I see the questions in their faces and wonder how I could possibly still be here. Hoping. Hurting. Dreaming. Trying to fall asleep with a million ideas of living howling inside my head. Trying to get out of bed with a weathered heart and make something of myself still. How has the longing and hunger and heartache not yet swallowed me whole, when it sits like a salivating jaw at the edge of every breath? I'm terrified to move just an inch too far and slip into those jaws. I'm afraid to feel too much, lest I feel it all and crumble.

I wish there was a manual for coexisting with ecstasy and terror.

I wish I knew that everything will be okay in the end.

I want to rip myself from the shackles I've called home for a lifetime.

I want to tear the cages from my throat and scream.