My hair is twisting itself around my throat,
curling into my lungs,
as I struggle to breathe.
This life is suffocating my confidence.
I need an outlet to plug myself back into
and rejuvenate.
Because I’ve been living ? existing
on borrowed time.

Oh god I feel like I’m having a midlife crisis
and I’m only 18:
too young to know,
too old to pretend.
It’s like I’m an adult with training wheels
and no one will let me take them off.

I’m breathing in the smoke burning from my past’s ashes,
breaking the skin of my mistakes
in feeble attempts to fix my mess of a life,
while only crashing harder beneath the waves.

I know that I can choose to either throw my scars up in defeat
or swallow my teenage spirit and learn to grin and bear it,

but I just don’t know how to not be a contradiction.