These are the kind of days I memorized all that poetry for, the ones where all I can do is repeat the lines to make my brain realign itself, like a diagnostic.

Maybe it keeps the panic at bay, but it makes me make less and less sense as I keep my thoughts in the echoes.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

As a coping mechanism, reciting verse about suicides and solipsists is an interesting choice. Maybe it's why when I write about my illness, I call it the crashing of the waves. I want to be covered in words, maybe it makes sense to try to drown out my mind with them. My kind of sense, anyway.

I lift my lids and all is born again.

I always feel like maybe the right combination of words in the right order can make it stop. After all, it was words combined in a certain order that kicked it off in the first place. I have to make the beauty echo louder than the pain, I guess, and I just don't have the volume right now.

I think I made you up inside my head.

That might be my fault, too. Other choices keeping me short of breath. I keep seeing things about cigarettes being passive suicide and I guess you can only claim to thumb your nose at death so much before every gesture becomes flirtation, before you wonder if you're just using the wrong finger to pretend you're not beckoning.

Maybe you're not fooling anyone but yourself. Maybe not even then.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

But dammit, echoes, alone and palely loitering, have nothing to do with the end goal. The end goal isn't the verse or the shortness of breath. It's a tactile, tangible, intangible, contradictory, impossible thing to make the echoes that hurt stop.

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

Maybe if I hadn't spent so long apologising for everything else, I wouldn't feel the need to apologise for whatever tricks I use to stay alive. If chiaroscuro coping mechanisms take me back to the light, if dipping into the dark is what it takes, maybe I am not sorry after all. Maybe I am never sorry.

I think I made you up inside my head.

I guess that's what I have. I am not sorry. I am coping. I don't ever have to feel like I am sorry for staying alive. I don't have to feel bad that I have a mantra of beauty and bad habits that I use as armor. Maybe, some day, I will find a better way. But so far, the answer comes back like the waves to the shore, every time I need to call.
I am not sorry.

I want forever.

I wanted forever before my brain could even begin to perceive it. I guess I still can't, but I am closer now. A car ride doesn't take forever, but waiting for test results can. Or a text message. Or to fall asleep.

I want forever in this really obvious way, like a bright top with matching shoes. Like genetics. Like death, like loss turned inside out. It can't fix anything, it can't solve anything, but I want it the way I want everything, more. More. More. Waves and waves like the ocean I fear and love at the same time.

I mean, granted, I don't want to turn into a tree, oak or linden, a bird to sing the things I couldn't speak, or turn to stone to have this, but there's days where I think that at least would still the ache. I don't want it to transform me, but maybe it will.

I want it in the way I want a million things, in a way that makes me wonder if I am missing the point. It doesn't make me want it any less. It seems silly to want something so inevitable. It makes me wonder if I am coming at it all wrong. It makes me wonder if I will ever really get it.

For years his passions had been like a nerve that the world jarred on; now at last the aching was soothed, and he could yield himself to love that was neither a torment nor a bore.