I can feel myself slipping again,

could feel it potently in the overwhelming desire to slip back under it all.

My fingertips are rubbed raw

from scrabbling at the rocky precipice till they bleed.

No matter how desperately I try,

there’s no way to romanticize this.

I pray to the words to take away the pain,

but then all I have is apathy,

and in some ways that’s worse.

I think I’m praying to the wrong thing.

Too often she hears me breaking through the phone.

Too often, I say, “I don’t know.”

She is flowering,

and I am decaying,

and we are further apart than I can stand us being.

I cry when I write now,

and I write when I cry.

And I guess it makes sense,

because poet is synonymous with pain.

I am throwing myself against these bars,

screaming the same faded phrases till my throat is raw,

screaming so I can hear myself again.

And I ache to go back to a time when I knew what this all meant,

ache to know if I want to live or die,

and most of all, ache to know myself.

But she’s missing,

and I don’t know where she went.