Escape

I can’t escape it.
It plagues me in the quiet waking moments that used to bring peace—
triggered in the mind when it finally felt like it forgot,
as if the subconscious knows the exact moment it will cut the most.

Sleep eludes me,
and when it comes, it creeps into dreams
where reality shouldn’t touch.
No distance safe enough—
a million miles from home, memories play on repeat.

Can’t outrun it.
Despite inner modifications, this race can’t be won,
and time hasn’t quieted it like everyone assured.
Watching the clock, praying the next millisecond will be the one.

Ghosts that haunt every breath I take,
touching every smile, every decision.
Skeletons that refuse to stay in the closet—
instead they dance like a morbid cartoon,
shaking me to my bones.

The allure of a spotless mind calls to me,
to erase the cause.
I’ve always felt to change the past would change the person I’ve become.
Such atrocities I’ve endured—
I never thought to change them.

They are me.
I can’t help but wish this chapter was written in disappearing ink.
Perhaps it was—
a beautifully riveting manuscript absorbed into the pages
before anyone could bear witness.

Like whispers touched across the skin, absorbed into flesh,
or feverishly hacked away with industrial-sized pink rubber erasers—
watching history fall to the floor in grey clumps
until I wipe it clean.

But the victory would be short-lived,
still imprinted into every molecule,
stained into the fabric of time.

Flee to orchestrated sound
to drown out the recollection—
but even the lyrics strip me bare,
singing my life with their words,
words too relatable.

A cunning beast that feeds on my soul,
that can’t be tamed through acceptance, force, or understanding.
A languid poison that corrodes the beauty laid before it,
constantly replanting a garden in a wasteland bent on turning it to ash.

Overwhelming in its vehement consumption,
desperately screaming to the Gods—
just let it grow.
Let the fires not reach it this time.
Let the clouds not rain acid.
Let the soil not succumb to toxins.
Please.

But they are deaf—
or perhaps it is only me they’ve abandoned.

The trigger that keeps this cycle on loop,
left to deal with the aftermath,
collect all the pieces,
the memories that have made me.

Little seeds of the self to plant again,
cultivating, growing—
until I cup the blooms in my hands,
just to watch them turn to dust,
fluttering away on a breeze that once felt like promise.

The movement needed to shift the blaze—
turn it away, only to flow it in.
Hope scattered like woodland creatures,
driven from the safety of home,
trying to outrun the realization
that when the destruction lives inside you,
there is no escape.