Small Ghost

by Trista Mateer

I mean, it’s embarrassing to be so sad, to be so weak, to be so breakable,

She’s been dead so long all her old friends have moved on to greener pastures. Time passing and all that. Time devouring. Time eating away at you and your little life.

not even sad in an interesting way /

pretending to be a poet, pretending to be a person.

small ghost sobs for sixty-five minutes Calls it a personal best. She keeps trying to break her own records. She keeps crying over people who don’t exist anymore or people who don’t matter anymore. Maybe both.

aren’t I too old to still be this sad /

The more it hurts, the less you’re able to speak about it. I am the most negative space in the room.

I often wonder if it’s just bearable sadness and everyone carries it around easily except for me.

She makes things so people know she’s still here. She makes things so she knows she’s still here.

Once she tried to draw a self-portrait, but she couldn’t remember what she looked like.

small ghost doesn’t clean her room It’s been eighty-two days since she last made her bed. Between trash and clothes, she can’t see the floor. She slept next to a pizza box for six nights in a row. At first it was a lack of motivation to do anything. Now the mess just makes it easier for her to disappear.

But it takes an awful lot of work to be nothing sometimes,

It takes sweat and tears to become something. Even something like this.

afraid all the time / losing interest in almost everything / basic hygiene feels like a chore with too many steps / she knows it’s ridiculous / that’s the worst part / she knows it’s not a big deal / other people manage just fine / but she’s not other people / she’s something worse / something stagnant / swamped under the weight of her own feelings / stuck in bed contemplating existential questions instead of making breakfast

I don’t know how to plan for the future in a world like this, so I don’t.

And the world keeps turning; how fucked up is that.

I take joy in the little things, but Jesus Christ is it hard.

I’m watching people forget me. Who I really was. What I was like before this. It’s not their fault. I’m forgetting too.

The cobwebs in her head feel so heavy, you know?

She can’t remember when she started digging her own grave, but now she can’t stop hovering over it.

Loneliness has its mouth on me. Loneliness has its hands all over me. Loneliness is eating me alive, but at least it’s touching me.

I speak and words just fall right through people. I don’t know how else to explain it. I wish you could hear me. I wish I had something worth saying. Everyt...

I’m embarrassed to admit how bad it’s getting again.

I know what I’m made of. Dead dreams and bad spirits. Crimes of passion and Coke Zero.

I’ll rally in September. Autumn’s like a blanket for the soul.

There are moments of clarity where I know everything isn’t as bad as it seems. Whole months, head above water. But when you’re drowning, you’re drowning. It doesn’t matter how many months a year you spend on land. And I am nineteen, telling myself, I’m going to grow out of this. And I am twenty-five, convincing myself, My world is not ending. And I am thirty-two, promising myself, It gets better. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; it’s what you have to believe in order to survive.

It’s hard to watch you clean up messes when she feels like one herself. It’s hard and it’s not getting less hard. It’s hard and it’s not getting easier. It’s hard and it’s not getting better. How do you accept you’ve lost a fight with yourself?

How could I let someone love me? How could I do this to another person? Who wants to watch me rot in bed? Who wants to watch me waste my life? Come join me in this black hole.

Life for other people seems effortless, but the walls are closing in on me.

she cries thinking about her brother dying even though it hasn’t happened

Maybe I enjoy torturing myself and playing the victim.

RECOVERY IS HARDER WHEN YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHO YOU USED TO BE.

Haven’t you seen the news? I want to peel the skin off my face. I don’t want to exist in the kind of world where these things are even possible.

They tell me this is the price for a better life. Set a timer for your medication and wait three to six months to see if you still want to kill yourself.

Do you blame yourself? For being this way? For letting it get this far? For not seeking help sooner?

Sometimes she wonders if society was designed to depress her / to make her worry / to make her lonely. It’s doing a good job. Her only memories from last year are about working and buying things.

poetry is a survival tactic poetry is resistance poetry is proof of existence

Wake up, dead girl, desire-driven and unremorseful. It’s time to start living again. Come on, Lazarus, it’s not over yet.

you do not deserve to be tortured in the pit just because you are alive

It’s so easy to feel trampled by absolutely nothing.

but you haven’t ruined your life. You have saved it. You’re saving it right now.

Bare your teeth and bite back at that cruel voice in your head trying to convince you this life is not worth living.

It’s true: hope alone will not fix the world. But neither will despair.

Getting better isn’t about moving yourself to a perpetual state of joy and goodness and happiness. It’s about learning how to pick yourself up and keep going, despite. It’s about betting there will be easier years than this one and then sticking around long enough to prove yourself right.

Wanting to be alive is exhausting.

You will not always be the ghost haunting your own life.