It eats her alive—

The guilt.

It’s tearing apart her insides

and spitting out shards of her bitter soul.

She is ashamed of letting it get this far.

She is ashamed of not knowing how to stop it.

She was feeling better; happier; lighter.

She cannot allow this.

She will not allow this.

She tells no one of her secrets;

of who she truly is,

because they will look at her and

see someone unrecognizable.

A total stranger looking back and pleading

for forgiveness she’ll never receive.

So her mind tells her that she is making everything up.

Her mind tells her that she plays a part in her own story.

But she is not an actress—she is punishing herself.

She does not think she deserves to call her traumatic experiences traumatic.

She does not deserve to ask for help

when others are struggling so much more than she is.

She has no right to be here, writing.

She has no reason,

no excuse,

for not being where she is supposed to be.

She does not deserve to be called kind

when her past mistakes were anything but.

She does not deserve to have people

think she is warm-hearted.

She is not a good egg.

She is rotten inside and cracked on the surface

so her spoiled soul is beginning to infect the air.

There is no river in her soul—

It has long since dried in a drought she created herself.

What remains is dust and shriveled up plants.

They cannot thrive;

they cannot even survive

If she sucked all the water up

for the tears she does not deserve to cry.

Why is she so selfish?

She just takes and takes

and kills all the wildflowers

that are supposed to make her beautiful.

There is no river flowing through her;

just old bones and cracks in the dirt

that get bigger with each earthquake that occurs in her chest.

Panic and fear settle in for the night

and they sleep soundly while she lies awake;

lying to herself that all of this will pass

and she will be just fine.

The river inside her heart dried out long ago.

She wishes the cracks would open up and swallow her whole.

But the world, much like her guilt,

would just spit her back out because

her heart is bitter and her soul expired years ago.

The river is gone;

no amount of rain could alleviate this drought.

Even if the water suddenly returned,

she would ignore it.

Because if she looked down at her eyes reflecting in the water,

she would only see a stranger staring back.

So she does not allow the river to return.

She refuses to let it flow again.