This

This is not the two years I've spent in quiet resentment, wearing my denial as a veil, tip-toeing around my shattered pride, desperately trying to stamp meaning to the bottomless of a bad experience, peering out a hole in which to pour all self loathe

This is not my pity-filled pain of offering my heart as a consolation prize, settling for being the second act, to a boy who shoved his insecurities so deep down my spine, that so much as mentioning his name, my lips would drip of poison, and washing-off hate, is like melting ice from a worn-out heart

This is not my pathetic attempt of stepping out of the frame of a victim, scattering all pieces of a life, with it's full weight of hopes and dreams, disrespecting it, by locking it to the background of a sulky little chapter with it's drenched title that reads 'unrequited love'

This..

This is when knees turn to dust, when grieving turns to seasons, you wear it month after month, when brokenness makes you feel like home, and strangers become the closest thing you've known to comfort

This is all my prayers drifting unanswered, into darkness inside of looming darkness, with a piercing guilt hunching my back, bending the back of my mind in refusing to accept that reality still stands

This is when bitterness turns tasteless, timid, vague and shapeless for my sweaty shaky palms to pick it apart, to wallow in the aftertaste of it's passing flavor and the binding starvation it leaves behind

This is when loneliness becomes persistent, tempting and seductive beyond my flimsy ability to bear it, devastatingly watching, as the dread dawn in, encircling the ruins of my dead conscious

This is the exhaustion of not knowing how to communicate my feelings to my family, how to dress this self in words of stones for a connection to recognize the sealed-in noise, and alleviate this heavy burden feeding my tired soul

This is the echo of a million cries, ringing like old church bells, swallowed in the vastness of my own cowardly emotional blankness

This is all the late night thoughts I've poured onto the delicate papers, smudged in running black ink and pointless indulgence, only to numb my static senses, till I'm no longer in focus

This is all the sleepless nights, I've spent with anxiety crammed in my single bed, chasing after answers with a consuming desire that'll never allow me rest

This is the unsettling misery, skittering like blue birds, every morning, at the dusk of my window,  carrying forgotten truths from the blurry nights of before, waiting for a chance to get in

This is powerlessness, watching the one I love, breaking, suffering, fading away into sickness, stealing the brightness of tomorrow's promises with him

This is hopelessness cracking my rotten bones, tossing, stirring  memories of my passing father, unwillingly, dragging me through a doorway of a distant home

This is the sound of stretching arms, into the blue glassed sky, at the sharp-razor edges of a sunken sanity, asking 'Is there even happiness after this one?'

This is the wall of silence I've built, around the wound that'll never mend, the raging storms I lose myself in, the separation I'm forced to live with

This is anger confused with sadness, boiling an ocean inside my chest, burning every good thing I've got left, smearing the little faith that chain me in

This is sorrow tucked deep under my sleeves, searching the dark rooms, for a familiar face, to sit silently and escape the raining seclusion of grief

This is loss, tracing the emptiness of what once was, longing for, rewinding a past, knowing all too well, it's never coming back

This is acceptance, hard-knocking acceptance of a shivering naked truth: of a cruelty, of reality that doesn't wait for anybody, shadowing fear in every move

This..

This Is Life, both tragic and beautiful, and I'll never know the half of it, no matter how far I carry this brittle tune