Broken frames, broken hands, broken lungs, broken.

Things that seem so easy to others, that were once easy to me are chasms. There is no way across. They spread wide before my feet and all I can do is slump to my knees in defeat.

If someone was to look inside this head full of chaotic lines and white noise, they’d face a battlefield of words and ghosts of words, thunder and rain and far off lightning.  They’d duck and sprint through torrents of tears and the fog of pain. If they make it out, they, too, will have lost the words and the ability to run, to jog, to walk, to stand.

Senseless, numb, dazed, vacant. Suffocating, shaking, vibrating, overwhelming fear. There is no in-between here.

They didn’t tell me about this in school. I didn’t know it was going to be a war from the starting gate, islands of light dotting this ocean of every thought, ever fear, every hope, every dream. Islands to cling to in desperation as the tide pulls at my legs, at my waist, at my neck.

Tenuous grips on truths and half truths, washed out by the onslaught of too much. Too much failure. Too much fear. Too much knowledge. Too much noise. Too much. Too much. Too much.

Let me float back to the top, let me set my clouded eyes on that horizon they named hope, with a resilience that was never mine. Let me breathe a breath without the water clogging in, let me grasp again at the fickle sand, let me mend.

Mend my frame of mind, mend these shaking fingers, mend my half-filled lungs, set me back upright again.