When I love someone, it isn't like when other people fall in love. My so-called “love”, becomes an obsession. An obsession that takes over everything. An obsession to please them and fulfill their every need, even if it's out of reach, like a book on the top shelf. Always reaching for what I can’t quite grasp. 

That person becomes all I can think about. I base my every waking moment around becoming what that person wants me to be, and if I get the slightest feeling that I'm not doing what I need to do for them, the mirror cracks. 

Say, the tone in which I read their text message is off, I will tear myself to shreds and rearrange myself however I think will make them like me more. Even if nothing is really wrong, I will go spiraling down the rabbit hole. If I even think that something is wrong, or someone is upset with me, I’ll deprive myself of the things that I need to stay alive, in hopes that they’ll see how sorry I am. 

The deep and driving desire to please every soul I encounter, is what makes me whole, but is also the thing that rips me apart each night when I look for the fleeting silence in my mind. Silence that disappeared years ago in the wind of thoughts, such a foreign feeling, I don’t even remember its gentle breeze. A storm, I hope will come again one day. 

~

The yellow streetlights bled through the car windows, rain crashing like waves against the glass. I patted my lips with the soft green fabric of my blankie, covered in various zoo animals, matching the rest of my bedroom, in hopes that it would bring me some sort of comfort. It didn’t. 

It had started out slow, quiet, with muffled arguing in the bathroom, the rain barely falling, just a drizzle. But as the night darkened, it all grew louder. The shouting woke me up, as it usually did, but something was off. 

My mom had drunk too much,  and my dad had gotten too angry, and before they knew it, they were slow dancing in an inescapable spiral of frustration. Whenever they would argue, the yelling would come to a halt as soon as I opened my door, but not this time. Stepping out of my room, I was met with the pair screaming at each other in the cramped bathroom. My mom’s phone was in the toilet and tears ran down her face. 

I was only five, but I knew that this wasn’t normal. My dad picked me up in his arms, my blanket dragging along by my side. He didn’t even bother to slip on my light up sketchers or my pink fluffy coat. He stepped into his slippers and ran me out of the moldy smelling apartment and into his already running car. 

The windows were fogging up from the temperature difference from inside the car, to the cold and rainy exterior. I drew shapes on the windows to distract myself from what was happening. Once my dad came back into the car, my window was covered in hearts, stars, and cats. Right as he turned the key in the ignition, the apartment door swung open and my mom came running out. 

She was barefoot, crying, and immediately drenched in the freezing rain. Both my dad and I looked over to the sound of the door slamming and saw her coming towards the car, just as he was about to drive away. She banged her fists against the window closest to me and yelled for me to open the door. 

Terrified and not knowing what I was supposed to do, I looked to my dad and he told me to ignore her and close my eyes. But I couldn’t close my eyes. 

As he began to drive away, my eyes filled with tears while I watched my mom chase after us. She was slurring her words but I could hear her yell “unlock the door,” and “open the door baby.” It poisoned my ears. The further we got, the more I cried. My little green blanket in my lap collected any and all tears that had fallen off my cheeks. 

All the streetlights had a streak of blurred light through them from all the tears clouding my vision. I thought back to that same afternoon, where we all sat at the park, my parents at the picnic table, watching me make wishes on dandelions. If I had a dandelion in that car, I would’ve wished to have stayed asleep throughout their fight and wake up like nothing happened. I would have wished that I could have opened the door without making my dad mad. I wished that mom and dad would relearn how to love each other, so that I didn’t have to pick sides.

~

Late at night, as the rain poured down, I lay awake, unable to fall into the sweet release of sleep. On my aunt's old CD player, my favorite album was playing, just like it did every other night. But tonight, I couldn’t keep my eyes shut. The album was almost over, which would only happen when I was already fast asleep. 

I should’ve fallen asleep by now, right? Why wasn’t I falling asleep? It was the first night that I hadn’t been able to hear anyone arguing downstairs, so why was I still awake, ready to go help if I thought I needed to? So many thoughts were flooding my brain and as silent as it was in the house, I couldn’t seem to find the silence in my own mind. 

As I tried to focus on my breathing, I ended up paying too much attention to it. I began to panic that I was doing it wrong. Even though I’ve spent my whole life breathing without paying a single thought to how I did, I suddenly forgot how to. Gasping for air, for someone to save me, pull me out of the sea of thoughts that was flooding my mind like the rain flooded the sewers in the street.

 The music stopped, the album was over and I was still awake, lying in the empty darkness, feeling more and more dizzy by the second. I could feel myself dying. I couldn’t breathe. If you can’t breathe, you die. 

Fearing for my life at the ripe age of eight-years-old, I pushed off my princess blanket and climbed down the ladder of my bed, running to find someone to save me. I rushed down the stairs and into the kitchen, where both my parents stood in silence. The look on their faces as they saw bloodshot eyes took away any breath I might have been able to take right out of my chest. 

They must have known what was going on, because I didn’t even have to open my mouth before my mom took me into her lap, sitting on the kitchen floor. Seconds later my dad was to my side having run up and down the stairs again with his emergency inhaler in his hands. He instructed me to open my mouth and placed the mouthpiece on my quaking lips. 

The sour taste of my dad’s inhaler flooded my mouth, pumping the air back into my lungs. The first breath felt like a cold, icy winter night. In the middle of August, I was suddenly standing in the snow, forgetting how to take a breath.

I didn’t want to believe it, but deep down I knew. I knew- that night, four months later, when they sat me down -exactly what they were going to tell me. I knew that they didn’t love each other anymore. That they hadn’t truly loved each other for years. They didn’t even try to hide it near the end. They slept in different rooms and I had to wake up and choose which room to go into every morning. At the time, I thought it was the hardest decision. 

But over time, it became which parent I should mirror. I always acted too much like my mom for my dad to like me, but  too much like my dad for my mom to like me. It felt like everywhere I was and everywhere I went became something rotten. I just wanted to be perfectly fresh. I wanted to be whatever everyone needed me to be. I wanted to be what people wanted. I wanted to be liked, but more importantly not hated.

~

Sat in the middle of a classroom, I wished everything away as J held my hands. I was too afraid to tell her to stop. To tell her I didn't like her touch, no matter how gentle she was. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I didn’t want her to hold my hand in the hallways. Even if I tried, the words would get stuck in my throat, like the sun hiding behind the clouds. 

She fiddled with each silver ring on my every finger, oblivious to how I shifted in my seat. Blind to how ripe my usually flushed cheeks were becoming. Numb to the way my hand trembled with uneasiness, feeling guilty for not finding the comfort in something as simple as a hand on mine. 

I thought back to the previous night, when she found out about the scars on my arms. How just an hour before, she had made me show her what I had done to myself. How she offered to get me what I needed to do even more damage. 

And now here she was. Holding my hand like nothing had happened. Yet still blind to any sign that I didn’t want it. My darkest secret was wilting in the cradle of her warm embrace, but she couldn’t see what was right in front of her. 

I knew that I should speak up, say how I feel, like my therapist engraved into my mind at each session. But if I did, she could get upset. Just the thought of her being upset with me made me want to crawl into a hole and die. I was stuck. Trapped in a dazzling quandary. 

~

It happened in the school hallways, where we were supposed to be safe, said to be protected from everyone on the outside. But what about the people on the inside? What about the hallway on the way to the cafeteria? The hidden crook outside of the auxiliary gym? How can they protect the girls who are too scared to say no to people? 

O spun me into his arms like the ballerina I always wanted to be, but not in the way I would’ve wanted. He pulled my arm, like a branch being yanked by the cruel wind. I followed him like the earth, following the gravitational pull of the unbearable orbit, because what else was I supposed to do? If I hadn’t followed, he would have gotten upset, and I would’ve wanted to die more than I did after he left me. 

He moved his hand up to my lips like a snake slithering up my body. If I tried to move, even the smallest flinch, he would poison me with the murderous venom. 

As his lips met mine, I didn’t feel like how they say you should in the books and movies. I didn’t kick up my leg in excitement. But I also didn’t push him away and yell for help. Instead, I just froze. I let him kiss me, even though I would rather be anywhere else. Maybe I was somewhere else, because it felt like my mind left me in that moment. 

Kissing me, he moved his hand up to my waist in a way that made me want to rip all of my skin off piece by piece until I was just a bloody mess. People were flowing by the entire time, but I kept my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see what they would do, although I’m sure most people didn’t even bat an eye. 

I felt like a work of art, but not in the way you would think. I was exposed. On display for everyone in the world to see. I thought it was fine, normal, even. Just giving myself to him like it was nothing. 

It’s nothing until it’s everything. It’s nothing until you’re curled up in the bathtub, trying to scrub off his scent. Nothing until you’re sitting alone in the dark, wondering why you feel so empty, wondering why you didn’t scream at him to stop, to get off of you. 

Just like so many times before, I was trapped. The walls were closing in on me and it was getting hard to breathe. There was nowhere I could possibly run to. Even the emergency escape exits felt light years away. If I had a dandelion in that moment, I would have wished to be sucked into the center of the earth. I would have wished to disappear. 

~

As S laid his head on my chest, I shut my eyes, taking everything in. The sweet smell of his hair flooded my senses as I ran my fingers through each strand. I felt at peace, like a soldier returning home, finally at ease. Everything about the moment was just perfect. Our hearts were dancing along to the same beat. 

Being with him makes me feel so different than I’ve ever felt before. I don’t feel like I have to be anything or anyone special. With him, I am never too much, or not enough. I don’t have to worry about not being what he wants, because he always makes sure to let me know that I’m perfect for him and that he wouldn’t want me to be anything or anyone else. His touch makes me feel safe, unlike anyone else's. I long for his warm embrace when we were apart. I dream about the smiles he flashes me from across the room. 

He knows me inside and out. He knows everything there is to know. What goes on in my head when I can't fall asleep. The faded scars all over my body. The reason I can’t go to certain parts of our school. That I can never seem to turn off my mind. He even knows how to make it a little less noisy. How to slow the war. 

He’s somehow found a way to bring back that calm, gentle storm that I thought I would never feel again. Twirling my fingers through his hair, I wish on an invisible dandelion that this moment, this feeling, this comfortable silence, will never end.