PassionsInsanity

 i remember that once i was about to have a panic attack and i could feel it building up like storm clouds or a rising tide and i thought of you, and i imagined the way you smiled when we woke up next to each other on some guys floor in october of 08 and it just went away. like it faded to the point where i could breathe normally. i tried it again the other day. and i swear i almost died from suffocation.

- how to guarantee a panic attack in the next 24 hrs - admit out loud how you think you're doing okay, you haven't had a panic attack in at least three days, and it feels really nice to be calm and in control for once. - how to sob violently in the cab - drive through that one street, because yes its shorter, and yes you can just not look out the window. but come on, did you really think that would work? - how to sob violently at home - kid yourself into thinking that you can handle that song/albun/movie/book. you cant; and you shouldnt. besides, didnt you already tell yourself to toss that out?

please, don't tell me how beautiful it is that i've parted my thighs like the sea. because there is nothing pretty about the tears in last nights dinner, or the way my hands shake around silverware. i am not poetry, but a language lost --in the spaces where flesh used to occupy lies everything i needed to say, kept as the only thing i could ever bear to swallow. if you try to write sonnets about the scars on my knuckles or the arch of my ribs, i will tell you in nine syllables less that this is more than abstinence and foggy reflections. i will tell you how my little sister can carry me in her arms like a child, and how my father can hardly

i have decided that our bodies are just vessels, houses rather than homes and i am a one story, white-washed wonder with every light left on underneath my skin

dear mom, i know i've written you dozens of letters in my life and none of them have made their way to your hands, but just maybe this one will. because this year, i will take this paper and plunge it into the earth where not a bit of your bones rest, but roses in your memory grow. on christmas, when the rest of the world is opening presents, i will drive too fast to the ocean where you sleep. i will run barefoot on the jetties you warned me never to step on until my feet string with salt and split open from shells. and this time, i will not be a self-fulfilling prophecy. i will not tumble myself heart-first into the sea where we laid you t