Tired

I'm just so tired of trying to fall asleep with an ache that pulses from the center of my forehead to right beside my eye.

I'm not tired of getting high, but it takes twenty-one days to start a habit and it's already been eleven.

Twelve, if you count tonight.

I’m harrowingly unfamiliar in the wake of “that’s just life.”

I’m cut at the knees like the stump of a tree that never got to be anything more than the shade that kept you cool from a sun you wanted to burn under.

I’m bubbling, I’m boiling, I’m breached from between the comforter on my bed and the mattress I confess too many things to too many people.

I’m tired,

And I’m helplessly tied to the friendly gaslight of “it gets better,”

To drunk advice from strangers,

To songs about loss,

To faces I want to kiss.

But isn’t that the romantically nauseating miracle of all of this?

That after everything one set of lips put me through, I still want to taste another.

And another.

And another.