I Can't Remember A Time When I Wanted To Be Alive

I was born with a flaw in my chemistry
and it's slowly eating me alive.
I've been sent to rooms with a person who unzips me,
empting me of all addiction, beliefs, knowledge,
only to refill me with theories of how to correct myself.
Doctors inject happiness into my veins
and feed me capsules to cover up the clouds in my skull.
I choke myself with pink pills to slow down my heart
and to help pass through the night,
hoping someday I'll be able to finish the bottle in one swallow.
I tear up my flesh to find relief,
to end the pain that's been following me since I could breathe.
I've cried seas with thunderstorms hovering above,
the waves crashing against the shoreline and taking me under.

I sit at a house that's suppose to be a home
but all that lingers are shadows of a father
and a pill bottle that resembles a mother.
I call them my best friends but they can't even name
all the illnesses that will eventually kill me.
They don't know about the nights I've convinced myself
that it'd be easier to die than to live this way.
They ask if I'm okay, say I can open up to them
but he's just curious and she's just a rumor mill

Don't tell me you know,
that you think you know what's it's like
to regret waking up every damn day,
to open your eyes and wish He would've taken it all away.
You tape yourself together in the morning
just to trip on depression and shatter once more.
To look in the mirror and see something so disgusting, so repulsive.
Wishing you could unzip and strip from this prison.
You stare and pick apart your body like it's some kind of game.
He says you're beautiful and the love of his life.
All you can do is disagree, then watch him leave.
They all think you're an attention hungry,
not agreeing just to feed yourself with compliments
but they don't understand how much you despise, loathe,
right down hate the skin you grew up in.
Tell me what it's like to have the monsters from under your bed
move into the apartment in your head and make a mess.
And if you think you know,
tell me how it feels to know no one will EVER love your mind
or your body or your voice or the way you put 26 letters together.

I'm stuck on repeat, retelling myself that
it's going to be okay, that someone will rescue me,
that one day the monsters will evacuate my head.
But the voices under my skin are louder
than the love he writes on my arms.
They said it wasn't going to be easy
but they never said it was going to be this damaging.
I'm trying hard, really hard every goddamn day
to find another reason to breathe, to finish my story.
But one day it's going to get stormy and the sun will refuse to come out
and I'm going to run out of lines to write down my purposes
for keeping my lungs filling and my heart beating.
I've fought so f*****g hard and got nowhere.
And now,
being under the ground is more comforting than being on top.