When people come to me I want them to feel like they are standing at the edge of a lake. I want to be reflective like that, cool like that, calm like that. When they touch me I want them to feel infinite and not because of me but because of them. I want you to love yourself, why don’t you love yourself, who’s been stopping you all these years?

I study neuroscience and know we are infinite. There are a trillion neural pathways in each of our brains, it’s no wonder we feel lost, it’s no wonder we always find ourselves anyway, blinking up at the light like the children we fear we still are.

We still are.

I want to love myself but first I have to find her/ what was ever found that wasn’t fueld by love? Curisoity/ the desire to know/ to know/ to undo the fear that keeps us from ourselves/ each other.

I got so close to you, it was like living inside you, all those chains rattling against your insides. I picked so many of your locks/ you let me touch everything except for you.

I gave you everything, including me, like a mother I loved you unconditionally/ is there any other way to love/ if there is I don’t want to know it/ I need to know it.

I cannot let you rape me I cannot let you rape me I cannot let you rape me/ you raped me/ I won’t unsay it because you can’t undo it.

But still. This bundle of axons I’m always toeing along, this imaginary tie to you/ madness/ how are these feelings any less real than when I said I loved you/ how are you actually any further away? So much of what we built was invisible/ so much of what you destroyed was invisible/ still, all of this matters.

I am tired of not being known/ touched/ able to exist in all my human parts. I keep telling people I am mangled from the inside out but I never actually show them/ myself/ hold myself.

I’ve clung to my truths as a way to avoid other truths. This poem was once as true as this poem and I am both of them and neither and more all at once. “I contain multitudes” lol but really it’s true. There is no room for nuance and there is room/ I have to make room/ secretly/ I am it.  

Everything I do is in service to someone else, an addiction to being needed/ useful. I try to break this cycle and all my illusions break away/ I am left with myself/ nothing.

I slip into this pain and think of you curled up like an infant on the floor in your apartment because the cap to your water bottle didn’t click three times/ or maybe it did/ how can you know/ I don’t know/ the water/ the water/ the germs. They really are everywhere. I used to suspect you were magic for being able to sense them/ this magic thinking of mine/ this is how I built you/ loved you.

Don’t mistake these words as me saying yes. I refuse to be ping-ponged from one side of the dichotomy to the other/ I am not an object, after all/ I object/ I am infinite.

I am a person. The danger is that I project my inner self onto others/ when I humanize myself I cannot help but humanize you/ love you/ myself. I need all of these things to be okay/ I need to have my needs met/ I need to learn how to say no as a way of saying yes/ to myself/ you/ the part I never reached.

I write as if you are inextricable from me/ maybe this is a truth/ a lie to distract me from other truths.

I don’t actually know.

I sit down against the wall and hug my knees to my chest like the child I feel that I am. This is what she needed/ needs/ this is where she is. Go there, I say to myself, and I realize I say it only to myself.

For most of my life I didn’t know how to say no to anyone because I imagined everyone as the babies they once were/ everyone as innocent/ everyone as hurting. This is selfish pacifist thinking/ this was me projecting/ this was a cry for help coming up from the depths of me/ every person became a mirror for the unloved self in me/ I just never learned how to recognize her.

Still sometimes I don’t recognize her/ she is not always a her/ but she is something/ she is holding me now. I hug myself and become her/ she becomes my guide. I close my eyes and show her my thoughts, how often I think about leaving, those thoughts like fiberglass, they insulate me.

She looks at me and says No. She doesn’t even beg, her voice still like the lake I want to be/ she knows I want to be/ she knows I will listen. She just has to say it/ I just have to listen. I will listen.

I am listening, still. Stay.