a spoken word poem

1. The day I start living without you is the day I finish writing this poem. You were born into me like a second heartbeat, a background conscience, a backseat driver, invading my veins and tinting my vision the color of ambition and endless opportunity. Under your tutelage, I learned how to color inside the lines with marker-drawn borders, how to dig trenches out from beneath my eyes and hide the pressure in my veins within them, how to muffle the gunshot sound of my crying, tears flowing from sadness to sadness, salt to salt. When the anxiety began to manifest, I believed them when they said it was only a symptom of my success.
2. By the time I thought to Google you, perfectionism, I no longer recognized the girl in the mirror, who stores mistakes in my ears like blackmail and leaves bloody footprints on the bathroom tiles, the husks of dreams dead in the bathtub. Make no mistake, I tried my hand at playing God - do you remember how you scolded me for the 94 (you got a 98 last time, you hissed), how you manipulated my mind into a map of every mistake I have ever made (you should have known you’d never get any better, you whispered), how you told me a hundred thousand times over that this was the best I could ever hope to be - but I drowned in that sea of expectation long ago and only came up raw and empty
3. I wonder now if any of it was worth it: the sleepless nights in a hurricane of my own making, agonizing over essays, the chorus in my head so silent it drove me insane, except for you, perfectionism, tallying all of the wasted seconds, the doomsday countdown, the time until the deadline when it has taken me 3 hrs to write a single sentence and the motor in my lungs breaks down without your gasoline.
4. Perfectionism, I hope for your sake and for mine that it was - worth it, I mean; the completeness of a to-do list etched into my bones even as I scraped the mountains of left-over paper on the splintering edge of my desk into the shape of the tragedy they are, the masterpiece of dissatisfaction I paper mache-ed myself into as I tried to divine the words for some sacred scripture, some sudden miracle. I hope it was worth it to burn, however briefly, and believe, however simply, that I could make something of myself — that I could stave off the hunger just long enough to gouge out a scratch onto this scorch of earth in the outline of my initials before the ink runs dry and the mirror warps and the mask falls off my imposter face. I have grown too old to play pretend.
5. Perfectionism, I am so tired. And I know I said I would stop apologizing, but, perfectionism, I am sorry. I’m sorry that I tried and you found me faulty. I’m sorry that it’s me - just me - and my climb was not enough for you, but my fall from grace was so devastatingly tragic that I set fire to my wings and painted the world in flames, all meteoric and melodramatic, on the way down, the Phaethon of my hopes and bonfire of your dreams.
6. Perfectionism, I carry you in my heart the way a cloud carries a rainstorm: wearily but too desperate to let go. I beg of you: leave me outside on the pavement with the Wednesday packages and the petrichor. And by now, I may be nothing but borrowed sweatshirts and burials reading: here lies my self esteem, but I must confess, I am finally trying to be okay without you.
7. The girl who used to haunt my mirror and ghost between my bedroom walls is slowly shriveling, tired eyes fading, blue fingertips limp and weak. But if by some twist of fate, you should ever meet that girl again, perfectionism, know her well.

     She will be the one with her eyes open and her wrists extended, waiting for the thunder to crack open her arteries         and the guillotine blade to fall.

     She will be the one to watch you leave and still be apologizing even when the door clicks shut like the end of a             tentative explosion.

     She will be the one to dream logically, reaching for the ceiling but never the stars because the precipice of success         is less steep there and the stumble far less brutal.

If you should meet that girl in the mirror again, tell her this for me: that I am only just starting to call her by her name, this cracked masterpiece, this stained glass window. That there is still a long road ahead to finding her and the tears still carve rivers down my cheekbones sometimes but the worst scars make the best poets and I wear that label proudly.

Perfectionism, tell her that I am sorry I waged war on her for so long when she was already hand-painted surrender-white. My gunshot wounds are still healing, but I see the flag falling now, so let me be the one to extend an armistice. Tell her that this poem isn’t done writing itself, but I’ll leave the stanzas hanging on the laundry line for a little while longer even when relapse dampens them with rainfall.

And if you ever have the chance, perfectionism, tell her that I hope she aims higher and falls beautifully. And enjoys the view on the way up and on the tumbles down and that, my, but she is just an imperfect perfect and I’ll be damned if I don’t wish her the world.