Goodbyes try sounding cavalier:
“Anyway, don’t be a stranger”
“See you around”
“See you, soon.”
And even when casual,
something wades below the words,
even if it’s just discomfort, a social awkwardness.
We all have to leave at some point and rarely know how to go.
I felt like a bad friend,
and I couldn’t handle it.
So I stopped being a friend at all.
I made it three weeks from when I escaped the bowels of the ER,
three weeks until I could not continue my performance as the girl who’s ok,
Three weeks and I was still the person I left in the hospital basement
now surrounded by people my ego urges me to call crazy,
But they sound like me,
Everyone is an echo of the one thing that they can’t fix
because we only know how to breathe when we justify it with someone else’s name.
We can spell our names in achievements and titles and still feel empty on the inside
because there’s a hurt kid taking up all that space,
the only space it had when it was trying to be grown and never became it.
I didn’t know that overachievers are also the most in need of therapy.
I didn’t know what rescuing the whole world left me wounded
until I was surrounded by people just like me.
and it makes sense.
Marisa McGrath 