What Was Needed-updated

My Mom says I have a look,
She can see every emotion behind my eyes,
As if there is a movie playing on the walls,
But she didn’t get the invite.
So she watches as a bystander,
Helpless to the thoughts that churn in my head.

I tossed and turned as my nightmares broke through the mirror,
So used to filling the cracks with ink,
Constantly making touch ups until the scenarios become clear,
Until I can make sense of the reality,
A tortured soul lays bruised and bleeding,
Gasping for a breath of virtue.

Reality has turned itself into a padded cell.
I sat in a great common room,
Indian style, hands in my lap.
Wait for the roar that does not come,
Visitors don’t come and go, food does not slide under the door,
Just the silence and the glass on the floor.

Six months:
of no words
of no therapy
of guilt, pain, and confusion
of stab after stab after stab
of darkness.

Drowning,
A new sensation to master.
A notebook and pen my deserted sidekicks.
I was lost without their guidance,
The medicine they produced,
Pushed the water from my lungs so I could float back to the surface.

My lungs heavy,
I was falling and I couldn’t see tomorrow.
My thoughts were frozen in a forever loop,
In the Starbucks line, during my favorite show,
The face that my mother talks about,
Becoming a permanent fixture,
My eyes, the doors to an internal war.

I was gliding through my days when
I noticed a hand print on my shoulder,
In a mirror, I glanced at a pair of hands on my back,
on my chest, another on my wrist,
And the fingerprints woven with words from familiar voices,
Doing the job that I thought only my poetry could do,
Keeping my head above water.

The owners gave encouraging smiles,
Laughs that made my face break character,
Text messages to make sure I was eating,
And when I couldn’t see past the darkness,
They built a campfire in my bedroom,
So at night when I awoke from the nightmares,
I could see their messages of hope on the ceiling.

I leaned on those hands for support until I was swimming,
Full force in open water, no longer weary of unspoken dangers,
Towards any shoreline that could be my new destination,
My anxiety turned into rustling leaves in the bottom of my stomach,
My mother no longer asked what I was watching on the walls,
The darkness now just a scar on my heart,
Six months for it to turn from my present to my past.

I now know what it means to have more than my four walls,
To have more than the words that I wrote down for my sanity,
But my heart still soars while I’m drinking my morning coffee,
A familiar feeling of a fleeting metaphor flies in my mind,
I smile, allowing the words to simmer on the edge of my conscious,
I might get light headed if I move to quickly,
So happy to show them what I have learned in their absence.