One day. One step. One breath.

(Hello whoever happens to read this. Sometimes at 2am I can't sleep so I start writing whatever flows out of my head. Hopefully someone can connect to this.)

You said that you loved me, but every time you chose that bottle over me you made me feel small. Every drop that went into your mouth created one more drop that would run down from my eye, down to my lips where I could taste the salt and around my nose where I could feel my brain getting clogged. But you said you loved me. And you said you were sorry for all the mistakes that you made. But sorry after sorry the word made me feel numb, then the word made me feel nothing at all, because the word sorry became five letters with no meaning besides where they fit into the alphabet. And year after year, I kept feeling smaller. But to the world I was strong. I was stable, I was the normal one. The perfect child that was supposed to stand tall. No one knowing that I felt my insides dying, grasping for life but I was so worried about your lives that I hardly thought of my own at all. And the world felt like it was collapsing in on me. One day at a time they say, but what happens when all you can think about in the morning is when you get to close your eyes again. Just one day at a time, one step at a time, one breath at a time. Just like that I found a man’s arms to run into. A man I said, he really wasn’t a man at all. How could he be a man when all he left me with was bruises and scars. I knew I had changed when my friend went to hug me and I flinched, programmed to be scared of a raised arm. And the bruises have faded after time, but years later and those scars are still here. They have warped everything I look at. Stability is what I was after you see. Stability. But the chaos never ended and chaos began to feel normal. Even as the chaos would fade, I became programmed to wonder what would break the calm, and bring a tornado rolling back into my life. But I’m supposed to be the strong one. The one that picks up the pieces of the people shattering around me and sticking them back together. The one that’s supposed to be able to pick up herself and keep moving on. And with every shard I’ve picked up I got more scars. And every day I look at these scars, these invisible scars that don’t really exist besides in the home I get to live in, which is really just my mind. Yes I know I am strong, but if another person tells me how strong I am I just might cringe. Because being strong can become exhausting, and with exhaustion you get weak. Even though I am. Yes, I am strong. And so are you. And although those shards that cut us when we pick up the pieces of ourselves may sting, and they may bleed, but we still bent down and picked up those pieces. And those pieces are different now, warped and changed into something we may not even recognize. But that’s what makes us strong. Because we take what’s unrecognizable and transform it into something new. And yes I look in the mirror and none of these stuck together pieces feel beautiful, but I’ll keep pretending into I figure out how to believe. One day at a time. One step at a time. One breath at a time.