I have not sat in a room with you in years, I haven’t been here at all,
I’ve been fighting a war in my head against the helium thoughts that have held me, kicking and suffocating, floating above ground since birth.
I am not my body, I am something much smaller, a distant yell or cry or scream. Barely audible and ignored.
My parents are aware that I\'m sick, something that needs curing. They’re so helpless to fix me.
Somebody threw up on my mother and she gifted her clothes to me, we are both disgusting and ill. I think she ignores the stench of us both. And I think she ignores that it doesn’t work.
I\'ve had a lot of time to think since she left, I think we are both cut from the same cloth, I think she didn’t have much to spare and has been stretching her broadcloth sheet to make her children. Though our sheets are thin and small and torn, we were not raised to be ungrateful. We have suffered but so has she, so we cling to our scraps of dirty fabric.
My dad was born from utter reserve, unlike my mother. And though his cloth is clean, since my grandmother passed, I think he’s been forgetting to wash it with soap. My brother tries to discard our father\'s cut, but he wears it in his suit pocket. I think I lost mine somewhere in our house.
I know I am not broken because I was never whole. I wore my prescription glasses for the first time and realized my whole life, I\'d never seen clearly. It was the first time I realized I was being betrayed by my genetics. I was 11. I know my mother knew about the bats in my brain before I did because I have a vivid memory; a goodnight kiss, a confession of deep existential fear from an 8-year-old, and an Aerosmith song sung by my musically untalented mother. I am a polluted ocean sung to sleep by a dying mother nature.
I am the sinner drowning in the biblical flood,
I am Noah\'s Ark, and I am God.
I am the unbreakable Titanic, and I am the nonviolent iceberg.
I am not my body, but something much bigger,
I am the roar of thunder and a burning star.
But in a very human way, I wish to be clean, I wish to trade my putrid clothes for fresh ones. I wish to hug my mother without needing a shower. I wish to sit in a room without being distant.
I wish to feel my body flat on the ground, present,
not floating