When you tell me you are tired and are going to sleep

I let you

I always let you, because I love you and I know you are tired and you should sleep

What is stopping you from sleeping?

We spend our days talking and laughing and our nights laid in our respective beds with our phones clutched tight in our hands and we smile and exchange loving words

And then we go to sleep

It’s just an ordinary night

Except tonight my heart is crying out for you

And not in that cute “you hang up first” sort of ways

No, my heart is crying out for you

It is saying:

 Please ask me what I’m thinking about right now

Please ask me what I was feeling today when I was supposed to be having fun hanging out with my friends

Please give me some kind of sign that you can see through me even though I have built an impenetrable fortress around myself

Please don’t let all the times you’ve seen me sad in class because I at sporadic moments lose my will to keep up my walls and pretend like everything’s okay and all the times you have noticed it’s not at all okay pass

Please see past my humor and my constant self-deprecating jokes

Please understand that I try so hard to push everyone away because I don’t know what they will see when they get close

Please understand that even though you love me partially for my humor, it is forced and constant because I can’t bear the thought of you seeing into my paper-thin skin and looking directly at my ugly, and speckled heart

Please look at me and see that even though I would gladly lie to everyone else, I cannot lie to you

Please see that when I look at you, I want to tell you everything

Please see that when I touch you, I don’t feel ugly, I feel beautiful, because you are so beautiful that it encapsulates everything around you and it draws me in like the sun and even though you call me sunshine, I know I will never truly compare to the brilliance you shine on me every moment of my li

Please see that when I kiss you, I feel the air being wrenched from my lungs as if I hadn’t willingly scarified it to touch you this way, and that I would give up all the oxygen in the world if I meant I could keep kissing you forever

Please look at me because every day it gets harder to sew my face back on my body as I leave my room

Please listen to my lies that I placate you with all the time, all the “I’m okays” and the “I’m just tired’s” and see the scared girl that has always lived in this skin

Please give me a chance to tell you my story and how every night I dream of putting an end to it

Please know that when I hear the word suicide, I don’t think of it as a thing that will leave a negative impact on my friends and family, I think of how that would mean I could never feel the warmth your palm gives mine every day in between classes

Please know that I’m so in love with you that it terrifies me because even though you’re the only person I would ever be able to share this with, I still can’t and I don’t know if I ever will

Please know that if you left I don’t know what would hold me together, except the thought of seeing you out in the world doing all the amazing things I knew you were going to do since high school

Please know that I have been trying to train myself for when you inevitable realize how incredibly ordinary and worthless I am and leave me, that I picture you coming in the room and telling me you didn’t love me anymore in the hopes that when it does happen, I won’t keel over right in front of you, that I can at least leave your presence and put back together my shell that was there before you came and knocked it down with a sludge hammer in the shape of your smile

Please know that at night its hard to remember that you love me, and that the beasts that are only asleep when you are awake are already clawing at my throat trying to reach my brain

Please know that I look at the bible that is 10 feet away from my bed and I cry because it just reminds me of another person who I will always disappoint

Please know that you are all I think about and I would do anything to see your dimples and watch your eyes crinkle, even if it means that every night I fight the demons and gasp for air until the sunlight filters into my room and I can see your smile in the daylight

Please know that I am the basket case that they warned you about in school, and that I will always be broken because of the little girl who was bullied and teased and excluded until she started slitting her skin open in 7th grade, because of the girl who carved the words ugly and fat into her skin so she could be reminded that no matter how hard she tried she would never be anyone worthy of love

Please know that I want to be better because I want you to want me, I want you to love me because you are my sanity and every cheesy pun from here to eternity

Please see me and see that I need you and help me because I’d do anything you asked me to do

Please put the demons to bed and banish my thoughts

Please open my heart and soul and warm them with your hands until I feel as if I have been reborn

Please help me forgive myself for the sins that have long plagued me

Please give me the strength to say I need help before I become a memoir in a yearbook or a show on Netflix

Please see me

But you don’t

And I saw goodnight

C.R