I’ll close the door to your bedroom

and turn the hall light off

I’ll keep down the volume

I’ll put your clothes in the wash

I won’t leave a note

it would smell like my perfume

I’ll leave my side of the bed cold

I’ll take my toothbrush from the sink in the bathroom

I’ll take my clothes from the closet

I’ll scribble out my name in your journal

put the tear-soaked tissues in my pocket

and burn all my letters, my words aren’t eternal

I’ll return your lighter

and wipe off my fingerprints off the counter

sear with every fibre

of my body - I’m out of power

I’ll find my scrunchie behind your bed

and wear it out on my wrist

let me join the dead

pretend we didn’t exist

I’ll tie my shoes outside

I’ll leave quickly this time

we grew up

in a partial build

a house never quite finished

and when people came to visit

they remained aghast at the lack

of bedroom doors...

An American necessity perhaps?

well giving in to social pressures

the family added over time

these light hollow panels

...with no door handles...

yes by that age even I thought

it strange, their omission...

having to crawl awkwardly

to pry open a way

from the crack

between the floor

in somewhat irrational

urgency because after all

what did it matter?

there was no lock

up on it...

And even when

the Knob was finally added

and it was several years in

it was merely decorative

a non-turning button

that did nothing

to hold the place in the frame

in the center left or right

(as is the traditional custom)

And still no lock was on it

I don't see this as aesthetic ploy

or feng shui or fun per se

but rather as a thing symbolic

or metaphoric...

the carpenter having some

philosophic tick

against it, in or out

I cannot say except

I've known

the well of panic!

from either side

...of the door

that will not open

and the one that

refuses to be shut

08.29.2023

Close a Door challenge @AJAY9979

I can't go back. I can't make different choices or speak to my younger self or use any of the methods of time travel dreamed up by so many who want to reach behind. This path, these choices, this present and the anticipated version of the future that I took--I can't change how it began. It feels like I should be able to, it was my path after all. I forged it myself, I took the trouble of walking through time, moment by moment, making decisions. You would think that would entitle some ownership, and you would think that ownership would come with editing rights. But no. It doesn't. There is only the choice now. And there is only the hope of a future that won't be so full of looking backwards to where it began.

The time is now to close the door dear friend.

The deceit, the lies, must end.

This journey has gone on for far too long.

This decision to part was not made on a whim.

The thing is. You're not my friend. You are the ghost that haunts me within.

You have held me back from healing and from seeing myself for who I really am.

But my heart is now armored like a shell protecting the sand.

The waves may brush by but you can no longer come in.

I deserve to blossom and now I can.

The time is now to close the door and to be my own friend.

There were times where I thought the world would be better if I just disappeared.

People like me didn't always think that they wished that they were dead. People like me wished that they never existed.

- letting go my past thoughts, part 2.

11:11 P.M.

I can’t stop opening the door to you, to us, behind the door is the grave you buried our friendship in, along with the time capsule filled with once treasured memories. I dig it up all the time, inwardly I cry over what used to be, the fragments of our once beautiful story. I miss you, I can’t seem to stop, I know there’s a small part of me that always will. It’s not like before, it doesn’t ache like it used to, but there’s a reason I still think of you.

I hate you! Why did you have to come back?! I was doing so well forgetting about you yet one text was all it took to send me spiralling again, why do you still even have my number? Please tell me you’ve deleted it, I just wanna move on. But I don’t, not really, I don’t wanna forget you I mean what happens after that? But I do, I wish I could forget we ever met, burn down the door, the memories, everything! I wish I could lock the door and forget where I put the key. I wish we could simply be acquaintances and just catch up every so often without it blindsiding me. I wish 2011 was the last time I heard from you, but it’s been 8 years of you coming back, 8 years of me letting you.

I wish we’d carried on growing up together like we planned, being roommates, each other’s bridesmaids, when I saw you got married a couple years ago it reminded me of how you lied. I love you, you know I do, that’s why you pick me up at whim like you do isn’t it? You know I’ll come back,.. I don’t wanna come back not anymore. I wish we could just have one last conversation, one last hug, one last fight, one last laugh, then shake hands, light a match and finally burn everything down together, finally agreeing to never look back.

Your foot's in the door

Keeping it ajar

My pride's on the floor

Weeping from afar

Adjoining rooms are portals

For the feckless mortals

Who shouldn't be together

Conjoined in life by tether

It will hurt when I stomp

On the foot from the swamp

That keeps me in the slaughter

Come Hell or high water

It's a final blow

That crushes the toe

And causes withdrawal

From death laced in floral

For slam and shut and lock and seal

Are not pretty words to end our ordeal

Time's come to stop the shelling

I can no longer buy what you're selling

Burning out in the cold has its consequences when my skills slowly become warped into weapons. There is this sneaky way you twist my words to straighten your own. This sneaky way you try to teach me to accept abuse when it comes wrapped with a bow. I hope you know that placing it gently in my hands won't change my mind. Not when you stripped me down to the bone, ripped me to pieces. It isnt my job to guard your heart and protect your feelings- I don't owe you anything.

But somehow you're still coming out better on the other side. Leaving me behind, stuck in your shadow, choked in the darkness without a purpose. So now I have no choice but to be duplicitous, changing my mind and then changing it again. I can't be ornamental anymore. I can't find any more parts of myself to shine for you. So go ahead and fold your ears, roll your eyes, and write about all my misgivings. Because through all of it, I will know.

I will know that even though you masquerade me as the offense, you're the one acting out of line. You're putting me down for your own peace of mind, using your indomitable strength as a ploy.

But I finally feel safe with the idea of change, and so when I haunt you from the shadows, I think I will finally have the courage to smile. Because I know your pathetic pride will only rot your mind, leaving you to crumble in the background, while I finally come out on top.

Dear Adan,

Jesus, I have lost all comfort in my ability to be myself. I feel like a hermit crab now, naked and afraid in the open ocean, trying to get to a new shell since I feel myself suffocating in this one, but knowing that coming out of my current one will leave me open to whatever eats hermit crabs. Piranhas. Let's go with piranhas. Anyway, I feel like this is a step I need to take to start to walk towards whatever my true happiness is. Not to say you weren't true happiness, but I am currently doing a Scooby-Doo-style running through different doors and getting to the same place to get to where I'm trying to go. I guess at some point you have to look the bad guy in the eye and make the choice that you're gonna figure out how to trap him and expose him and save the failing business from the shady businessman who was doing weird shit to garner more money.

I haven't felt this comfortable talking in a while. I guess I can explain why I'm like this. Last September, my great-aunt died, and I had a mental break and was sentenced (that's a fun word. More like gently led to and left at) a mental hospital for a little bit. Ten days of learning boundaries and slowly reattaching to reality. Before that, I had been uncovering whatever weird sexual abuse I'd gone through that my brain had locked up in some mental Guantanamo Bay with my therapist. But then, they diagnosed me with bipolar disorder (or borderline personality disorder because everything's on a goddamn cyclical spectrum nowadays), and that has been the hardest diagnosis to face thus far.

I feel all the feelings currently, so let's slow it down and get deep. I have technically known that I am bipolar since fourth grade. This child, let's call him Amir since that was his name, specifically told me that I was bipolar because I did not like him and used him for candy and money. But what fourth grader can articulate their incapability of whatever "love" is supposed to feel like because of some internal pain they don't exactly understand? There is mental blindness when it comes to trauma, and apparently, I am Stevie fucking Wonder when it comes to this situation because I can feel there's something there, but I cannot see it, and trying to uncover it has been a labyrinth of awful gut feelings and obscurely strange memories.

We can start with what I do know. The person you met was me. I am, well was, comfortable in my own very unique skin. I like obscure references, making jokes, using GIFs, reading, writing... when I say you got about as much of me as anyone ever has, I mean it. You really were my first love, and I will always hold that close to me. But I also know that I have an unhealthy attachment style of needing someone desperately and not needing them at all. I know that what you did, leaving constantly for whatever reason it was that time, was, at the very least, extremely hurtful. Pretending you were gay so I would stop loving you hurt me. You hurt me with some of your actions, and those are actions that I have to forgive.

They're actions that I do forgive. I can still feel the vitriol for them when I remember you because I have never fully acknowledged that pain. I can't say you aren't important to me or that what you did even remotely takes away the love and joy and happiness I feel when I remember you, but it still happened. I really want you to know that you leaving seventeen months ago (yes, ya girl's been counting) hurt me badly. I mean, you basically told me that you were addicted to Valium, told me you were going to sleep and would talk to me later, and just never came back. If you're reading this, part of me wants to refer you to the Cardi B GIF "WHAT WAS THE REASON" but part of me just, is tired. I want to know that you're okay simply because you're important to me, and I love you. Not romantically, not anymore, but just simply as a person. You are such an amazing person and someone that I want to have nothing but the best in this world.

I hope you're alive. I remember having this dream of you standing on a blue-tinted white beach in all white, smiling at me about two and a half months after you left. It freaked me out since that's the typical death scene in every movie, but I guess I should've felt calm since it signified peace in some way. I'm running out of steam now, but the point is, I love you, dude. I want myself to have the same peace and joy that I wish for you, and I know that in order to do that, I have to say goodbye. So, listen to the song in the title and know that this is the last love letter I'll be sending you and that I don't expect you to come back. Thank you for being the example of what I wanted in a soulmate, and I hope that I've helped you in some way too. Adios, pendejo. [Use that Rosetta Stone you spent all that money for :P]