Forever Young and Silent

My life is not mine
I belong to fragments of a smashed mirror
I belong to a million broken images of myself watching me
seven years of bad luck

seven bad years of constant surveillance
I spy on myself
I won't let myself be
I don't hate myself because that would be too easy
I have an obsession with self-help and self-improvement
and restoring the parts of myself that died with my friends

One friend had killed himself while our kitchen was being redone
After I got the phone call, I told my family what had happened over microwave-cooked cheese omelettes

after the wake, after the funeral, after the burial, after I'd read the suicide note, after the kitchen was done, after winter turned into spring and then summer, I'd sit in that kitchen at 3 in the morning watching Cold Case Files
lovely young brunette women disappearing on warm summer nights in the early 1980s or late 1970s in California
their bodies found half naked on the side of the road
I was too hyped up on Abilify to eat
I weighed 100 lbs

That summer
the summer of Cold Case Files
is sticky in my memory
sticky, ephemeral and hot
like a mirage on new black pavement on the highway

I want to fix myself
I want so, so much to be
right, and correct, and beautiful, and true
and to have nothing wrong with me
I want to have that without taking pills
but if I don't take my pills, I might end up like my friend
beautiful, but disappearing into the warm, sticky summer night recesses of my darkest thoughts
and being forever frozen in time, that turns into the past, as a frozen gray memory, a faded photograph

forever young
and silent