Breathe No More

Originally wrote on: April 27, 2011.

I’ve been looking in the mirror for so long.
That I’ve come to believe my soul’s on the other side.
All the little pieces falling, shatter.
Shards of me,
Too sharp to put back together.
Too small to matter,
But big enough to cut me into so many little pieces.
If I try to touch her,
And I bleed,
I bleed,
And I breathe,
I breathe no more.

Take a breath and I try to draw from my spirits well.
Yet again you refuse to drink like a stubborn child.
Lie to me,
Convince me that I’ve been sick forever.
And all of this,
Will make sense when I get better.
But I know the difference,
Between myself and my reflection.
I just can’t help but to wonder,
Which of us do you love.
So I bleed,
I bleed,
And I breathe,
I breathe no…
Bleed,
I bleed,
And I breathe,
I breathe,
I breathe-
I breathe no more.
~Breathe No More-Evanescence

Where do I begin with this song?  So many things stick out to me about it.  I used to listen to this song almost every night.  And throughout my day in the height of my sickness.  You could argue the case that I was sick because I was listening to “suicide” music almost all day and night.  And maybe that did leave its stain, but I don’t think it would have really mattered.  I believe I still would have gone down that road, and it did show how I felt.  It helped me to express myself.  So did my poetry I’ve found over the years from that time.  I wrote out hundreds of poems over that year, and let me just say, they ain’t pretty.
My friend and I used to joke that Evanescence was our happy music.  We would sit in the hallway the hour before school would start, blaring it.  We would listen to it and feel like we weren’t alone.  Maybe that’s what we wanted with it.  Maybe that’s why we listened to it 24/7 along with Nirvana, Hawthorne Heights, AFI, Avenged Sevenfold, and Disturbed.  I don’t think listening to my suicide music made me suicidal.  But you could argue that it really didn’t help, and I’ll agree with you on Disturbed, looking back.  But with Nirvana, Hawthorne, and Evanescence and Avenged, to me, they spoke to me.  They said, this is who I am.  I may be dark and twisted inside, but that’s just me.  That’s who I am and the right person isn’t going to care.   This is my pain.  This is the hell I’m going through.  This is the world I’m living in.
Back to the song.  I felt like that for so long.  I felt like my depression and my illness was lying to me, telling me I’d been sick forever and I wouldn’t ever get better.  The truth is, I couldn’t remember anything else.  I couldn’t remember when things had been okay.  “Maybe, I’ve never really been okay.  Maybe I say I’m fine because I don’t want you to worry about me.  Maybe I want to really believe that I’m here, I’m fine, but the truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever been fine.  And when someone stops you on the street and says ‘hey what’s up, how are you’ they don’t want to hear much, and they certainly don’t wanna hear, ‘I’m not okay.’” (Journal entry from November 2005, aka hospitalization #1)
I felt like I was so broken on the inside.  I felt like there were so many pieces of me and I didn’t know where to even begin, to put myself back together.  I didn’t know where to go.  I remember calling myself Humpty Dumpty.  I had fallen, and I didn’t know how to put myself back together again.
It was an ode to my eating disorder.  As I lost weight, did people like me as I was, or the thinner, “better” version of me?  It was me trapped in the war with my mirror.  With my body and my mind.  I was at war, with every thing, and every one.  As I stared into the girl in my mirror, I honestly thought, someone is playing tricks on me.  I’m not that thin.  And I was in no way anorexic, but I was about 50 pounds lighter than I am now.  I never once claimed to have anorexia.  I always knew I was either NOS or Bulimic.
It was how I felt after having been abused.  I felt like I was shattered into so many pieces that day.  I felt like I was left in so many pieces and I would never get better.  I had trusted someone, and that did NOT work out for me.  Because I didn’t want to be alone.  Because I believed there was something in him worth saving.  But he went, and he took, and he used, and he left me.  Broken.  Naked. Bare. Exposed. Raw. Shattered. Smashed.  Hating.  Dead inside.
I felt like I would never get to the other side.  But, there is a light at the end of of the tunnel.  There is another side.  The sun does come out.  You have to work your butt off to get there.  You have to keep fighting the demons inside, the voices telling you you’ll never make it, you’ll never win, that you’ll never get there.  I can tell you, you will.
There’s light, even in the darkest places.