How To Live With Your Worst Enemy (4/18)

I.                      

Run away, run 2000 miles away,

To a place this part of you has never seen before.

Convince yourself that you’re free

While the bully is latched to your back like a shadow,

Awaiting the right moment

To dig under your skin again.

Just when you think that your new life is awesome -

You survived

Without the eternal judge deciding how you live,

You write your first college essay,

And the bully leaps,

Pressing your face into the carpet

Until you can’t see through the tears

Telling you that it will never be good enough

That you should’ve started sooner, worked harder,

Worked your entire life learning how to write the perfect paper

And now you can never get the time back.

II.                    

You realize

That your body is bruised and bleeding

And your tormentor won’t go away,

So you do what you can to distract it, appease it,

You hurt yourself before it can hurt you,

Because at least the scars you inflict on yourself are predictable.

You spend two years hunched over a toilet bowl,

Quietly surviving,

Watching the fear and the pain whirl around,

Disappearing with your last meal,

A penitential offering.

III.                  

A broken system doesn’t last forever.

The bully is too smart to stay distracted,

And enough self-chosen wounds

Can still wear you down, and make you sick.

You stop coping.

And when you’ve reached the end of your ability to give in,

You decide to stand up and fight.

But how do you fight a shadow?

How do you duct tape its mouth to keep it from screaming?

Maybe, if you can scream louder,

Scream for the things that you want, and the things that you want to believe,

You can finally hurt it back.