truce » poetry

i take my shoes off at the door of my own mind

i feel homesick for a place that is not tangible. give me a map or the tools to go anywhere in the whole world, the whole universe, and i could not go to the place i miss.

i am homesick for memories. i sink my teeth into my own skin, hoping to rip free what runs through me so that what i so desperately miss can finally be real and i can touch it. 

i can keep reaching and reaching but i will never grasp it. i will never be free of the torment of knowing that i am not homesick, i'm just sick.

im sick because i have to keep introducing myself to my own mind like we are strangers. i am sick because my heart betrays me and i can feel the walls tearing me down from the inside. i can feel everything smashing to pieces inside me and my ribs are a cage that all the hurt and pain ricochets off of so it never goes away, it only gets worse.

i miss when i was empty. i miss the tumbleweeds that used to dance upon the sandy expanse of my mind, no bigger than a mote of dust in a sunbeam but to me, reaching to the farthest corners of the universe.

i used to be so small.

i am still small, but a different kind. a kind that finds homes and niches in dark corners and disappears from the real world too often. the handholds that i grip onto are too slippery to make the climb back into my own skin easy.

i want to rip my own chest open so that my ribs spill forth all the motion and the space inside me can finally quiet. 

"but i'll still be empty."

"but no, i'll be at peace."

i want to spill my own insides, make them my outsides, so i can sort through them and find out what i'm saying when i cry until i can't breathe, what i'm saying when my heart twists inside my chest and arrests my breath, locking it away in a glass prison that stays whole while everything else breaks. i want to know why my body is made up of tectonic plates that are constantly moving away, away, trying to escape even though they have nowhere to go. 

i want to know where i want to go.

what am i homesick for? the person i used to be? who is that?

if i could call them, we would not recognize each other and then i'd be falling father, hurtling past the earth, past the core, past myself, the phone line between us stretching taut. because they would try to help. a pale, reaching hand, but i'm too far away and the cord snaps and now i'm hurtling, careening towards the end of the world and it's not forward it's down. 

when i close my eyes i see a vision that i want to be the truth so badly that it plays out in front of me when i open them again. i see myself, from a distance, climbing out of my skin and leaving it piled on the ground, miles and miles of chains that kept me bound to regrets, broken promises, broken thoughts, and just - me and i see myself walk away from it but i am nothing anyway and now i have nowhere to go.

so i just vanish.

i unzip the air like i unzipped my skin, my self, and i disappear into the wind. the wind scatters me about the world and i see so many beautiful, wonderful new places that i can almost forget the itch of homesickness inside me. i creep into the minds of people better off than me and worse off than me and i still feel free. 

i will always be free as long as i am not myself.