A Poem In 24 Lines.

1. I used to pray for happiness, now all I wish for is peace.

But my mother never taught me how to pray for something when I can hardly speak, when my words jumble and clash and slice the inside of my throat as I try to get them out – my mother’s god is a god of words and the mute are all damned by default.

2. Heaven’s pearly gates burnt my eyes, so I knocked on the devil’s door instead – it seems to be though, that even he has chosen to abandon me.

3. I would’ve set fire to the doors of both heaven and hell, and laughed with you over the screams of gods and demons, indiscernible across the heat, if you’d have asked me to.

4. But my brand of love always comes too cheap and gets bland after a while, like gum you have chewed for too long, my love leaves an abrupt bitter aftertaste, so of course you left in search of better things.

5. After you left, I spent six months pouring out the mess you left me with into my words. The six months after, I put away my pens and paper in a locked box at the top of my wardrobe, out of reach and hidden like scissors and knives from a child with an affinity for sharp objects and blood, with an affinity for self-destruction.

6. Somewhere along the way, I got used to the holes in my lungs, I learnt to breathe with them.

7. At 17, I read that everything we ever lose comes back to us, one way or another.

8. Everything was fine until you decided to drop into my dreams. I started to wake up with screams of please don’t let me leave stuck in my throat again.

9. In my mother’s world, consciousness is life. When you sleep, you are semi conscious, you are between life and death. Your consciousness is divided into two, and what you see when you dream, is what the half of your consciousness that travels experiences.

10. My mother’s world is the one I grew up with. It is my default world, and when there are holes in the new world that I am trying to create for myself, they are filled by default.

11. I would like it if your consciousness stays to other realms, far, far away from mine. Because –

12. When she broke your heart again and you told her I had been right it did not magically unbreak my heart, stitch my broken skin back along every scar. It did not break and put together perfectly again the last three knuckles of my right hand.

13. Some cold days my hands still bruise again at the knuckles, as if my body remembers how I tore it apart after you left. As if it swears over and over again to never forgive me for it.

14. At 18, I realize that the only truth of my universe is Murphy’s Law – anything and everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

15. I have been cursed for centuries, my atoms cursed from every life they have lived. I am being punished for sins I have not committed, for lives I have not ruined.

16. My soul has collapsed into itself with a pitiful whisper, and my ribs have cracked from the weight that pushes down on me, twisting into my lungs until every breath splutters with blood like old car engines on cold mornings. Your consciousness must stay away from me, you must stay away from me because –

17. Seeing you dug up memories I had buried deep under 6 feet of concrete. But somehow I was the one who ended up buried under years worth of memories, heavier than concrete, heavier than anything could physically, possibly be. I am trying to dig out now, with only my hands for tools. How much more damage will you do before you leave me alone for good?

18. These cursed hands were made to create, I scream at the grey faceless walls that cage me in. They laugh at me instead and watch in silent amusement as I destroy my own hopes for salvation.

19. Everything I have ever started but never finished still stares at me through the incomplete painting still stuck to my bedroom wall with tape.

20. But I don’t know what completion feels like – what it is like to be whole. How can I make something whole when I am not?

21. And yet, if you’d have let me, I would’ve thought you my best project – you would’ve been what I was most proud of.

Complete or not, you could’ve been what I was most proud of.

22. My mother’s god is one worth praying to, but only when you’ve worked as hard as you can, as much as you can, for the fulfillment of your prayer – a god that grants you only the fruit of your labors.

23. Maybe that’s why my words fail me as I try to form a prayer, maybe that is why all my wordless pleas fall on ears that only turn away from me. Maybe, at the end of the day, I have never wanted anything enough to actually get it.

24. So tell me, where do you damn your life and everything in it to, when it’s all already going to hell?

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Image taken from Tumblr.