I have learned that it is unfavorable to deny feelings. Especially if these feelings appear overpowering because you have yet to experience feelings of this magnitude in your tiny, tiny life. In comparison to such lovely feelings are the ones I experienced in the past, to which I promptly dug them shallow graves. Never allowing myself to feel became exhausting, and in response, I did not allow for others to feel as well. I denied myself and others the love that we all feel we deserve.

I can boil under the sun but especially

when it rains and when the sky is engulfed

it makes me afraid so I sit and I simmer in silence

and I will emerge when I am forced to drag

an unwilling, ignorant body from a stone plank

To continue to wake and bask in the chill I can smell

and it flows through the thick, dark hair on my arms

and I come closer to my destiny but

I am huffing and puffing

so I rip the clown nose off my face

and leave a gaping hole in the middle.

I still don’t have a clear image of myself, one that I can pull up for classroom icebreakers. One to convince myself my skull and the wall should remain separate masses. Frosty mornings spent in a haze is one thing, yet I cannot recall any feeling besides mournfulness once it elongates through the entire month of February. The haze first consumes my appetite, and I feel full while munching on my smolder.

I walk with purpose and have long, concentrated strides

but they all wince and are disgusted by my open sinus cavity

“This isn’t me”

“You don’t know me”

“I am so much more than my body,”

but no one can hear me

so instead I sit and I simmer in silence

they know my blood isn’t blue

so instead I hide

it is my fault they can see my insides

they know that they are rotten now.

A gray blur prevents my phone from being anything other than a portal to comparison. It is so rude of Instagram’s algorithm to show me the skinny models wearing the semi-affordable clothing, that I sigh at my bank account and I sigh and I sigh because the haze will loom until I am able to consume freely.

And as I hide from the unwanted moth

in my kitchen I wince at its twitching excitement as

it reaches the object it desperately desires

they know I am chasing the light so I cannot be smug, like the moth, who has already caught it, and can brag

and flicker around my light

so instead of being smug

I hide deeper and deeper

like they know I cannot find the light

I can’t see my reflection anywhere and I have no choice but to sit and simmer in greyscale

since the moth took my light.

The light continues to disappear, and it removes all sight of the external attributes that make living inside of myself worth it. The dissection of myself is orbital, and I often like to think that the rest of the world remains only for me to pick the beautiful and the inspiring and stick it onto my laptop.

I see a light through a haze, sometimes. Not all the time, but when I do it is glowing, and I become fixated upon it like the spiral building in the center of campus I’ve always particularly liked. After a rainfall when the building is lined underneath a glistening frame. I see my reflection in a dew stained glass door, and I chase the light.