It takes everything I got. It takes every pill I can fit in your mouth to shut you up—to show you I’m more than a wave or a candle. I’m not crashing down. I’m not burning out. I’ve grown to hate the taste of blood and so I will not bite my tongue. Wash away the chalk outlines you’ve already drawn around your life. You’ve tried digging this grave, but it’s in concrete and with a rusted spade. And this time maybe I’m not just screaming at walls and maybe it’s not just you or the echoes calling back. Calling me back to corners I’ve been fighting to get out of all my life. Bound with self-restraint, gagged with “it’s too late,” I had said goodbye to too much of my life, but now it’s clear to me that that ship, it was bound to sink. And this time maybe I’ll pull the stitching right out from my lips and I’ll sew myself tighter to the backbone I’m growing again. Growing again, I’m almost a man. I’m not the boy you’d like to make out of me. And I know it’s true, you can’t count on a single hand the number of times you’ve tried to die and you think you know enough about the world to make up your mind about shit like that, but you don’t. Do I contradict myself? Well, sometimes it’s hard to be as positive as Whitman. A heavy heart is like the second skin that I’m doing my best to fucking shed. Wishing you were dead is harder when your friends would kill you if you did. So now I’m breaking ties with you. I’m choosing life. Cut away the things that bind. Because now I’m free—at least enough to sleep straight on through ‘til morning.
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