(when you feel like you've lost everything)

i've always been great at pushing people away. isolation is my forte; it's familiar, comfortable, and safe. but no one knows that because i don't let anyone know. i've never had many friends and i don't know what to do with them because i'm not sure what to do with myself.

it's difficult to go back to old habits when i tried so hard to be a new person at the beginning of the semester. everyone now thinks that something is wrong, but something has always been wrong--they just weren't there to see it.

after i was finished destroying the lives of genuinely good, if not fantastic, people, i found that most, if not all of my creative work from this past year was gone. all of my pieces i was planning to fit in a chapbook--gone. all of the revisions i had done--gone. if i didn't feel behind already, i sure do now.

i was hoping too high and planning to enter into Button Poetry's chapbook competition in the summer; i already had about 12 pieces ready to go and i tried to work on it as much as possible. i logged into where i save all of my current work and everything was lost.

i think the universe is just now catching up to what a shitty human being i am. it hasn't taken me too long to notice.

i'm not quite sure what to do with myself now. i've had several good cries, two bowls of supersweet ice cream and i've been emotionally texting my mother for days. i know which poems i'm missing, but i can't, for the life of me, recreate them. and they were well on their way to being good! there are so many published poets who've gained recognition at the age of 19 and that was my deadline. now i have nothing and a mo
nth and 4 days to get back to alittlemorethannothing.

when you feel like you've lost everything, what do you have left to gain?