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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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![]() like a flower ensnared by a weed, I am a child strangled by the future in this field of pastel watercolor, I sink to my knees Asphyxiation. blood sloshes in the veins between my ears; there is a pounding in my skull as faces spill into my head, young and familiar laughing. I don’t need to run my finger along the curve of your smile to know every intimate line of your expression yet now? you wear a stranger’s face. maybe that’s just who you are. grass tickles my collarbone as I
collapse, writhing and aching and craving respite, from the heaviness of all I have lost, all I still stand to lose the inevitability of grief burns like whiskey in my lungs from the bottle we spun in your basement, high off the adrenaline of our crime. it won’t be a crime soon. it will never burn the same. my chest tightens and strains on the verge of collapse. frustration and fury seize my bones and I slam my fists against the unfeeling earth, a silent airless scream tearing from my lips, demanding the world to stop spinning on its axis. to give me back those placid days, sitting side-by-side on carpet earbuds split between the two of us, sharing the worn lyrics of a musical we’ve heard a thousand times. lyrics that now have blanks in my head, lines that tether into nothingness, my mind fumbling to complete each phrase. my fingers scrabble at my seizing throat trying to find the words. my head goes underwater, or so it feels distantly, through this cocoon of heavy silence: a whisper of music how vivid the memory had been: him and me playing duet on piano you and her singing along on guitar sworls of sound swelling through the hall in a whirl of kaleidoscopic color; the euphony tasted of ambrosia yet the memory comes to me now like a faded photograph, with washed-out colors and out-of-tune notes; Hiraeth it is a bittersweet word, I think as I sink into the earth. let me frolic through these fields from the afterlife. braid flowers into hair now likely cut short or curled or dyed atop a stranger’s head let me lie in peace beside their eternal corpses my eyes flutter closed: bury me amongst my ghosts. Comments are closed.
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Unless otherwise noted, all pictures used are open-source images in the public domain. Archives
September 2023
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