Crystal, Gold and Neon

I lie and say reality has become so troubling that I need a break from it, dipping my nights in poisons encased in crystal so they catch the light and make me think I've found gold. I lie and say I love the nights I spend forgetting the days I've spent failing to grow.

I wander back to a warm bed or a warm couch and find myself curled up in the arms of people I love, whispers in my ears of how they’ll never let me go, but the back of my mind has a digital countdown to the day they see my mess as nothing more mysterious than a sink full of dishes (the day they make me someone else's problem, the day they give up).

Because where I'm from we hide the mess. We rake the leaves into neat piles to be picked up by men with trucks and carried to somewhere with high fences, meticulously repainted as soon as weather starts to wear them down. We hide wire and cords behind plaster, laundry baskets behind doors and garbage bins in little wooden huts. We have rules about neon lights. We use fake grass, or truck it in from a farm upstate – purebred like our blood and our pets that cost more than your annual salary.

It's not so bad, to drive along and not see the dirty laundry, to walk among beautiful people with beautiful clothes and beautiful cars and consider myself among them. It's not so bad until nightfall leaves my room lit with starlight and I have to escape out the window to breathe because the voices in my head have taken up all the oxygen. It's no so bad until the idea of feeling beautiful has faded along with the green in the grass and the life in the trees. So here's my mess, my dirty laundry. Here are my wires and cords, my imperfections, my scars, my neon lights. I lie and say I'll never change.