2am clawing

It is always around two in the morning when the darkness remembers my name. The world is quiet enough that I can hear every thought clawing at the inside of my skull. I convince myself I can build castles before sunrise, fix every broken piece, love hard enough to outrun every fear. By daylight they’re just ruins I was never strong enough to finish. I get excited too quickly. I fall in love with futures that haven’t happened yet. I make homes out of dreams, only to wake up wondering why I’m standing in the rain. Then comes the numbness. Not sadness. Sadness still breathes. Numbness is colder. It sits beside me in silence until I can’t tell where it ends and I begin.

I run from confrontation because somewhere along the way I learned that my voice changes nothing. No one ever took me seriously enough to stay and hear the whole sentence. So I disappear before I can be dismissed. It hurts less when I leave first. At least that’s the lie I keep feeding the darkness. They tell me to dream smaller. My mind doesn’t know how. It only knows how to chase a thousand impossible tomorrows with bleeding hands, then hate itself when none of them become today. There is something twisted about loving with every piece of your soul while never believing you’re allowed to keep the things you love. That’s the darkness. Not that it tells me I’ll lose everything but that it convinces me I never deserved to hold it in the first place.