Strawberries and Jane

Is it true that addiction caters to satisfaction? 

I think I’m an addict. Not to chemicals or old friends, not to lost love or skin touch. 

But I’m starting to realize that I adhere to self-consciousness. 

I need and I crave. I love and then I’m still. My whole life smells like memory and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.

What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with me? I sit and I swing. I’m breathing while pacing, and ultimately unwell. 

Self-consciousness is a white ghost that follows me everywhere. I begin to pull my hair out of worry.

I don’t like this. I’m standing in my way–sitting in the middle of the big wide nowhere, and I wonder if he’s somewhere. 

Scott tells me I’m supposed to be authentic–that this is the only thing I should strive to be, but I know he sees me in the back of his classroom, swelling and begging to be believed. 

My eyes burn like they’ve been opened in a pool of chlorinated water on a hot day over the summer. My eyelids are heavy and red. Loopy and warm. My stomach is on acid, yelling at me whenever I look in a mirror. It gurgles loudly and drains. 

My legs shake and I can’t open up. The sun glows and radiates onto my skin, massaging its light through my walking corpse. 

Back to 75, I am running to when I was seventeen. A foot in a foot out.

I’m tired and need twelve hours, maybe a week if I’m afraid. I need to do absolutely nothing.

I need to drink iced water when I wake up and eat bacon without rushing, to cook pancakes and let them rise. I need to squeeze lemons in a glass and act as if it’s something I do regularly—in a solid, stable state of the divine.

I’m no artist, all I can do is really write. It hurts. I burn. It leaks. I believe and then in the end this empathic distress is on a breaking tip making me feel less and unseen.

Nostalgia. Nostalgia. Nostalgia. The clover I find everywhere. 

I’m crying and my tears water the flowers, filling the pot without me even having to take a shower. 

I see the ordinary in the extraordinary–but the people who love me make me sick. They staple metal to my forehead making me feel not so big. 

“Are you high,” I’m asked and I just want to say, oh for fucks sake, I’m just wanting to tap into my inner little kid. 

I don’t talk about how I feel. I know it’s a bore. I see it on the faces of my friends. I have them for a second and then the glue tacks up and I feel it, and they know it, and the conversation ends. I remain quiet and continue moving on back to them. 

I can’t do this like you did that. I’m at the edge of a diving board, the water is crystal blue. Untouched and glistening. And I know it to be good, I want it to be fresh. I need it to be true. 

I’m used to the quiet–to my space and routine. I don’t like answering the phone or feeling a false version of a girl I should be.