"Letters In A Drawer"
Letters in a drawer seem to define me more and more. They are a constant steel necklace around my neck becoming tighter and tighter with age. They were contained inside the brown mahogany cell for several reasons. Hit and run, child abandonment, and murder in the first degree. These letters are declared guilty, and sentenced to life covered up by dusty copies of the magic tree house. They used to chorus sweet whispers into my little head, but now that i’ve grown up they only my only feeling towards them is pain and dread. I try my best not to turn my head in their direction, scared I could indeed get their infection. A virus. A sickness. Too much like a tapeworm. Something you notice, yet you still try to avoid the doctor hoping the drugs in the cabinet weren’t out of date from the last time you were prescribed. Even if they were you’d still take them. Take a pill to be happy, take a pill to sleep, take a pill for a sickness. Pills are apparently the answer to my tapeworm issue. What’s the doctor’s number? Perhaps a psych because i’m starting to hear voices in my head telling me i’m not alright. No, it’s not my head. The seven prisoners seem to be calling me names, and telling me my worst fear. That I am just like the writer. Memories haunt my dreams, every night I have to relieve a life that I so desperately try to forget. Nine year old me and my father sitting in a booth at applebee's, a day which I first fell in love with someone I didn’t know. The idea of stability consumed me. I need surgery immediately says the doctor, come on in. I was an alcoholic chasing after the bottle. I wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore food, my brother, my mom. Four years later my sister was screaming in another room because she apparently had an attitude. A year after that he dissected the only family I had. I wave him off to rehab, and two weeks later my first letter arrives. A year later i’m suicidal. My letters being the good prisoners they are, stay in their cell in hopes of getting time of their sentence, yet the still are damaging me. Every morning when I wake up to the yelling alarm clock I feel a weight that I can’t seem to put down. Getting heavier every day it’s a constant war in my head trying to force myself out of the bed. It asks me what the point of everything is, and I never have an adequate answer because as it seems there is not point. It’s a useless routine which my body has grown tired of. The letters make me even unsure of my clothes. “Purple? Are you sure that’s your color.” Apparently it’s not color. Depression is a side effect of being left by people you love. I can still hear him telling me he loved me, and the door shutting quietly. His sobs clear through the walls. Criminal charges include hit and run. A hit when he took a girl from her mother, and a run when he left her somewhere else. Letters in a drawer make me feel pain so much more.The questions never stop. Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Do I wear the right clothes? Certain people I used to look up to made me aware that the answer was no. Loneliness is an old friend who comes to see me more than he does. I asked lonliness why I was so hard to love, he told me not everyone could see the things he could. He told me we only needed each other,... and I believed him because no one else went out of their way to love me, or so I believed because I was so infatuated with him. I chose a bubble of solitude for him to be able to stay. He was more a father than my actual father. I developed a type of asthma that doctors could not see. I struggled to breathe because I didn’t want to, and loneliness told me it was okay. Criminal charges include child abandonment.....(continued on next page)