Amy Reed

All I know is I want you to be happy, and if I could do anything to give that to you, I would.

You act like you're invincible, but I know deep down you want someone to hold your hand and buy you flowers and look you in the eye and tell you you're his soul mate. You want someone who will love every piece of you, even the pieces you can't love yourself.

What if I can't ever be who you want me to be? What if I keep letting you down?

I said just let me try one more time and she said, "THAT'S ENOUGH, ISABEL," again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because I'm always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH.

I'd love to wrap myself inside your sadness and pretend it is mine

What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the dark? Do you remember the world with mothers and fathers and stillness that did not feel like death?

Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?

Phones are only good for ordering pizza and telling someone you're running late

I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

Everyone's always making fun of him and calling him crazy behind his back, but I can kind of understand how someone would end up that way. I mean, if no one ever pays attention to you telling the truth, then it probably makes sense to try lying for a change.

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

How can she stand up there so tall as she__ telling us how her mother beat her and her father molested her when she was a little girl? How is it possible for her to look so proud? How is she not being consumed by shame? She should be disintegrating before our eyes. She should be struck by lightning, and God__ big, angry, booming voice should be shaking the room with __ow dare you? I told you never to tell._ But that__ not her God, she says. Her God is loving and kind and wants what__ best for her. Her God loves peace and serenity and forgiveness. Her God doesn__ make her keep secrets. I thought I knew God all my life, but maybe it was some other guy the whole time. I want this God. I want Val__ God. I want a God who doesn__ make me jump through hoops and hate myself to earn his love.

This thing that__ always been inside and hidden deep is getting bigger and stronger and threatening to show itself, and I want to stop it but I also don__, and I don__ know if I__ ready, but I think maybe I want what__ inside turned outside, maybe I want everything out in the open, all my secrets laid out for everyone to see. I wonder what that would look like. I wonder what kind of mess it would make. I wonder if you can ever really be ready for the part of you that you__e been hiding your whole life to finally come out.

...and I know -I just know- you can remind me what it feels like to have someone look at me and love me with wanting me to be something else.

I think before I ever became an alcoholic, before I even tasted alcohol or tried drugs, I was already programmed to be this way. Before there was cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can__ get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.

I don__ feel great, but I also don__ feel terrible, either, and I guess that__ how normal people feel most of the time. They live in the space between black and white, and their ups and downs are various shades of gray, not the extreme highs and lows I__e always thought of as normal. I think that__ one of the major differences between us and them, between addicts and Normies. Somewhere along the line we got stuck on this roller coaster that only knows how to go to the highest up and the lowest low. We get high so we can feel invincible and perfect, but the feeling never lasts. Gravity always wins, and we fall fast, to a place lower and darker than many people will probably ever know. And the crazy thing is that this is just normal for us. We cycle through these extremes all the time, and it__ become as natural as breathing. Exhausting, but natural.