Love Letters
Location
For as long as I could remember
I've used writing as an escape
When I came home to an empty house, so contradictory
Full of expectations of me
I wrote
I filled page upon page with beauty and pain
Everything that I had lost, I could regain
I would listen to my mom argue with her man or my sisters in the other room
And I would spill my guts onto peices of paper
Instead of spilling my dinner into the toilet
I was twelve years old and I didn't know there was anything wrong with me
I just thought
Maybe if I was pretty
They would listen to me
Maybe if I was skinny like the other girls
Someone would notice that I was important
Well no one noticed
So I bled ink, with the pen as my blood vessel
I would write tortured and mangled stories
So that maybe the monsters in my head wouldn't make me write it on my skin that night
By this time I was fifteen and well aware of the damage I was inflicting but I didn't care
I deserved it
No one cared enough to see so I must have deserved it
Hungry for words with no time to make withdrawals of food
I stopped making deposits altogether
My bones protruded like the imprints of letters on the opposite side of the page
I'd become everything I'd every written
Condensed to fit in one paperback spine
But, such as books are, I was prone to ripping and tearing and burning
I did it
I ripped at my skin and I tore at my hair and everything that was hidden inside those pages I'd written went up in flames
Finally, the world could read who I'd become and it was inescapable
Now, most psych hospitals are only required to keep you for 72 hours
I spent eighteen days in, what I can only describe as, rehab
Rehab for the tortured mind
For the frail bodied and broken willed
But the point of it all wasn't to feel imprisoned
It was to help me realized that I was liberated
There was no need to hide my words or disguise my feelings
There was nothing wrong with who I was
It's ok to be me
One year, four months, seven days, and several spiral notebooks later and I'm still not perfect
But no one ever really is
The best we can do is learn to love, if not ourselves, the people around us, or the things we do
Every letter I write is love
And this is a love that will never leave