Trigger Warning: depression, drugs, eating disorder, suicide

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He reaches out and touches...

nothing.

Nothing.

Loneliness blurs his vision,

turmoil in his chest,

tightening, a torture of another kind.

The clamp around his lungs,

does not release and he can barely,

just barely breathe.

It's hard for him,

to

breathe,

to,

breathe.

As if life couldn't get any worse he must

push through sinking sand, each step,

he goes a bit deeper until he needs a straw to breathe,

but,

he can hardly breathe already.

The tightening gets worse as days go on,

he tries, in vein, to ease his suffering

and leave the world for bit but,

he's too afraid to overdose on anything.

He doesn't reach out anymore,

knowing there is nothing there,

not even fog,

or smog.

All there is for him to breathe,

is ash from a long-ago erupted volcano,

and the air hides small glass particles,

that stab his already delicate lungs.

He feels like a ragdoll,

no,

a lab rat in a bad experiment doomed to die.

He can only see ashes,

and darkness,

and his own blood-shot eyes,

bleeding wrists,

needle-scar ridden arms,

and thin, fat ankles.

He finds a mirror and turns away,

because all his stick-thin body is to him,

is a fat ugly, disgusting pig,

who eats too much by eating nothing.

He can only see

all that is wrong with him

and all he doesn't have.

He can only search in the wrong directions,

for right answers he will not find.

He can only try to fix everything at the same time,

while leaving a trail of destruction behind.

He reaches out and touches...

nothing.

Nothing.

* * *

She reaches out and touches...

nothing.

Nothing.

It's like he doesn't exist for anyone anymore.

It's like he's but a ghost of an existence,

from his own past.

She tries, in vain, to reach him,

but she's on one line and he's on the other,

and they never seem to be on the same one at the same time.

She sees him beating himself up—

a bully to himself.

She doesn't understand why he would do such cruelties but,

she's trying.

She hates to try sometimes and,

beats herself up for being selfish.

She's his mother,

she should be willing to sacrifice herself for him,

but she doesn't want to.

Does that make her a bad mother?

The thought among many others,

plagues her when she sees him.

The thought comes at her, attacking her heart,

but she shoves it away.

And when the thought is silent in her head,

others haunt her every day.

Why is he so thin?

Why did he turn to drugs?

Why doesn't he stop hurting himself?

It must be her fault, she decides,

and slaps her own cheeks,

punishes her own wrist with a ruler,

pulls the heartstrings out of her heart,

because what good did they do when he needed her most?

She had

pushed him away.

She had

yelled at his face.

She had

withheld her love.

He was so far away now.

She could see him,

a tiny dot on an ashy horizon,

reaching out with both arms,

blindly searching for someone to hold on to.

Then, as she watches,

he just falls,

and,

she has lost him,

her son.

What a failure she was

as a mother.