This is a new start.
They don't know about the tremors. They don't know about the scars. They don't know about all the times that you wanted to get rid of all your friends. They don't know about all the times that you wanted to get rid of yourself. They don't know about your fantasies of genocide and suicide dancing together on a tightrope, locked in a deadly waltz that refuses to leave the tantalizing strings of my heart. They can't guess about about the source of that scar on your hand or the bruises on your lungs or the sentimentality of a keychain.
This is a new start.
They don't know about all the times you tried to self-diagnose yourself but nothing seemed quite right. They don't know how your mental health writhes and each piece pushes up and against each other, looking for a grasp at anything real. They don't know how you spend days in the tunnel of dissociation, each smile feeling like I was carving it with a knife. They don't know how you relied on that one person in that one room to feel for a second that your life wasn't rolling down a cliff, towards the reaching and writhing fingers of the black fire. They don't know about how many dreams you had of the black fire wrapping around your vision, just like the tunnel of dissociation, but more permanent and greedy.
This is a new start.
But of course you're a failure. You'll open your mouth and your heart will pop and the black fire will spill out of your throat and cloud around you. They'll know that you house the dying star of a wish that you tell the moon to take back. They're able to smell the withering dreams on you. The smoke pulls at your hair and tries to mold your face. It'll whisper about how the it itself is too thick for me to let the others breathe it in. It points to how attractive the loops in my handwriting will look around my neck. It laughs at the pitiful amount of life that seeps out of me by accident and asks my why there's not more.
This is a new start.
You're starting to be able to see the other clouds. I can hear as each heart is pierced and screams like deflating balloon. I feel more chilling heat than before as I see the flames licking my friend's lips, the one who stopped writing in cursive because the L's looked threatening. Our clouds mingle, their fingers locking, weights balancing and adding and multiplying. Finally, they outweigh themselves and fall to the floor. They scratch at the tiles, grasping for us. But we have wrung them off our ankles, left to mist the floor in gray. I hope that the mist will build until all the problems are below and our heads are clear of any fire but that of courage and cursive is safe again.
