circles

Some days,
I am in line at the grocery store
And the person
Standing in front of me
Knows the ghosts that follow me by name.
They ask me
How I’m doing, what’s new
And I read them the script
I wrote on the backs of both my eyelids;
Rinse and repeat
Until they leave me alone.
Some days,
I wonder why it is that
The search for myself turned into
A solitary mission and
The version of myself that I’ve found
Says we don’t need to reconnect
With those who’ve been left behind,
Because I need to stop
Feeling like I am the stray dog
That doesn’t know where else to go
To get its table scraps,
I have to be done going back
To people who lack the ability
To give a single shit about me.
The circles I ran in
Ten years ago were filled with
People who thought their problems
Mattered more
Than the gallons of demons
I poured down the bathroom sink
Through the open doors in my wrists.
Some days,
It feels as though I have always had
the maps backwards,
Never ending up where I need to be
Wrong place, wrong time
Wrong people
Some days,
I am reminded of people from yesterday
And my heart turns into
A gaping hole inside my chest
That the soft animal of my soul
Laps at
Like an open wound
And some days,
I laugh at these people
Who seem so sad that I walked away from
Pushing the button in their brains
That make the good feelings stay
And some days,
I wonder why it was so hard for them
To push that same button in my brain,
And why it was easier to give
Than to take
And some days,
I can lay waste to this notion
That I will never feel okay, because
It hurts a little less and feels
More like I escaped from
A circle full of people
who only drained me.

it’s about isolation. it’s about drifting apart. it’s about accepting the fact that self isolation ruined a lot of good friendships, and now it’s nearly impossible to get that spark back. it’s about people wanting to be your friend even though you’ve decided you’re probably never going to feel the same amount of warmth that they feel when they look at you. it’s about that feeling you get when someone you don’t want to talk to flags you down at the liquor store and asks you how things are going these days.