Infinite Hall of Mirrors

I know every symptom, I can name every defense Intellectualize the blood until the blood makes sense Turn myself to literature, dissect myself in tense Past, present, future, none of them convinced I used to think self-awareness made you free Now the mirror knows more vocabulary than me Every little flaw becomes a PhD Every compliment gets cross-examined brutally Pretty face, ugly thoughts Good intentions, awful costs Found myself, then got lost Paid in years for what I bought And everybody loves you when the tragedy is clean When the scars become aesthetic and the breakdown fits the theme But nobody wants the boring shit between Taking pills, doing dishes, trying not to fucking scream I don't need another cure I have spent my whole existence Trying to make existence sure And maybe there is nothing Written somewhere in the stars Good. Then these hands are mine. I just wanted somewhere to begin Don't worry where I went Don't ask what happened then You'll recognize the eyes But you might never see me again Never see me again Never see me again I killed the narrative. Internet raised me better than the neighborhood did Learned desire from a screen when I was still a kid Learned my face was something you could optimize Before I even knew why I hated photographs of mine Twelve tabs open, four identities One says "genius," three say "disease" One wants God, one wants peace One wants everyone who knew me to watch me leave Not die— Leave. There's a difference. I want my name to feel unfamiliar in their mouth Want the old coordinates to point to an empty house Want every prediction they made about me to fail I want to become somebody impossible to tell I changed hormones, cities in my head Politics, lovers, substances, beds Changed the language that I use for dread Still wake up carrying conversations with the dead April sunlight coming through the blinds Worst anniversaries have beautiful skies There's a cruelty in how the whole world survives When somebody's universe stops but the buses arrive So I learned: Grief doesn't make you special Pain doesn't make you wise Sometimes suffering is suffering And everybody fucking lies Including me. Especially me. But I meant it when I said I loved you. They want the comeback arc They want the clean diagnosis They want a pretty little moral Growing out of psychosis They want "I was sick, now I'm better" Black screen, white letters Credits roll, audience cries Everyone goes home feeling clever Fuck that. Some mornings I'm brilliant Some mornings I rot Some nights I love living Some nights I love nothing a lot Sometimes I'm narcissistic Sometimes ashamed that I breathe Sometimes I give everything Sometimes I manipulate what I need Sometimes I look in the mirror And she's almost finally me Then one angle changes slightly And suddenly I cannot see But I'm getting tired of declaring war On a face that never attacked me before Getting tired of making beauty a court case Getting tired of putting existence on trial every day Maybe I don't need a verdict. Maybe acquittal is enough. Don't ask me what I'm becoming. I don't know. That's the first truthful thing I've said without footnotes. I spent years constructing explanations For why I deserved to occupy space. Now I just occupy it. How obscene. How beautiful. I thought meaning had to come from something higher Some metaphysical judge, some celestial wire But a star doesn't need permission to catch fire And loving one person can be reason enough not to retire Maybe consciousness is accident Maybe history is cruel Maybe every human narrative Is just an animal inventing rules Still I want coffee in the morning I want snow somewhere up north I want books with notes in margins I want to see what I become I want stupid conversations I want somebody in my bed I want to make embarrassing art About the machinery in my head I want to outlive predictions I want wrinkles eventually I want to meet every future version Who would've been impossible at seventeen So when I say you'll never see me again I'm not talking about a grave. I'm talking about the girl You might never see me again Not the way you knew me then Let the old name haunt the hallway Let the old world wonder where I've been Don't worry where I went I don't owe you evidence If you recognize the eyes That's enough. You'll never see that me again. Never see me again Never see me again Don't wory about her, Don't worry about me