Tunnel Vision

They say it's okay to not be okay...  

I'm not okay...  

Haven't been for a while...  

Don't know if I ever really was...  

I'm working on it,  

But I'm having a hard time appreciating the progress I've made...  

Small steps forward through the molasses thick depression is something...  

I have to tell myself that...  

I have to keep inching forward...  

Pushing against the gravity...  

Sometimes everything feels too heavy...  

I haven't given up,  

But, then again, giving up isn't an option...  

Thousands of miles to go...  

I try not to think of all the things I couldn't have...  

Things that brushed up against my fingertips in the dark...  

Just out of reach...  

Every spark of light extinguished by circumstance...  

Heart spaces I couldn't save from their own darkness...  

Children that died in the womb, time after time...  

Souls I couldn't pull from the ether...  

Lovers whose words turned from tenderness to full blown hatred...  

From sweet nothings to chocolate cysts in barren wombs...  

The smell of iron drying from red to black...  

Me, bloated and grey-green on the operating table, intestines packed with gauze, code blue, but not dying...  

Propofol, pentobarbital, and thiopental keeping me from pulling out the IVs, and feeding tube, and ventilator...  

They say I survived for a reason...  

That I had more to do with my life...  

Eight years later,  

And I'm still trying to figure that out...  

I've got plans...  

I'm working towards goals...  

I have things I can be proud of...  

But I'm looking up from the bottom of a well...  

The sun high noon above positioned just perfectly to blind my dark adjusted eyes...  

The walls slick with algae,  

I'm expected to climb...  

I've taken emotional beatings left over from other people's childhoods until I stopped feeling...  

Those were the times I knew it was time to move on...  

I've gotten good at moving on...  

Shedding skins like a reptile...  

My eyes going milky before being reborn,  

Shiny and new  

With the same old soul,  

Tattered and torn...  

Stacking up the bodies,  

The used up husks,  

Until they reach that place where people toss in their coins and make a wish...