badlands
I started this piece on May 4th and finished it on May 22nd without the intention of ever publishing it — it felt too personal and too dark, and maybe it really is both. I’m still not entirely sure I want it here. However, I’ve been out of this headspace for around a week now, and I had a very healing and supportive conversation with my mother last night, so I’m feeling a little more stable again and I don’t think I’ll return to it for awhile.
“As long as you’re alright,” he writes,
and all I want to do is ask, and what if I’m not?
But I don’t,
because while I’m sure there’s honesty in his words,
I also know that he won’t have an answer.
it’s getting bad again, I want to tell him,
but bad means something new every time.
What I do know is that today, it has me on the verge of collapse,
my body ready to give even though the edges of my vision remain clear.
In the past it meant crying, it meant anger, it meant corporeal emptiness,
but this time it’s just a total lacking.
This time I’m conscious of the ways in which I no longer feel like myself,
as if I’ve gotten better at understanding the depths of my mind even though I still can’t seem to escape them,
or even just see the warning signs.
I spoke too soon about my sight.
Sometimes I realize that I don’t even know what his handwriting looks like.
there’s a freedom in running that I can’t explain without masochism
because there’s a pleasure that comes with the pain of my lungs closing in on themselves,
and while I don’t smile during races it’s only while I run that I feel grateful to be alive.
there’s a certain pride that fills my chest when drivers brake because they realize that I can sprint faster than their cars can turn right,
but there’s also a place in my brain that wishes they had kept driving.
sometimes I’m scared to go home because there are too many ways to make a car crash look like an accident.
sometimes I wonder if running has biologically altered the ways my body processes adrenaline and endorphins,
or if I’m grasping at chaos because the push and pull are the only highs that I know how to feel.
I hold generations of grief in my body,
the heartbreaks my mind knows blending seamlessly with the ones only my blood can,
yet despite it all I believe that my love is greater even if my brain plays tricks on me.
or maybe I’m lying to myself because there is nobody else here to drag me away from the edge.
the only person who would ever really try is the last person I will ever want to be honest with,
because my mother is the only person I have ever wanted to repay and I don’t know how to tell her that I never will.
I can run from my own disappointment,
but I don’t know how to live with the weight of my mother’s.