swim good

Picture yourself in a subway station, great. Now, picture the people, the noise, the roar of the 2:30 departure. Now picture that you are alone, that there are no people, no noise, no roar of the 2:30 departure because there isn’t one. You are alone and you don’t get a subway station, you get a black eye and yelling everyday. You get the hard part, the unfair part, the lion that escaped from the local zoo and is being chased with a dart gun and if the lion is lucky, an actual gun. People are cruel and wild to things they do not understand and it has always been that way. The world works in twisted ways and the gears that hold it together are cracking more and more everyday. You’ve pictured the subway station that doesn’t exist, now picture the lion and the zoo, why is the gate open? Why did the lion escape? Was there ever a lion in the first place? Some questions are better left unanswered and some better left unasked. There is a time and a place for wonder but this isn’t it, not the right time or the right place, that's the gag, that’s where they get you. There is never a right place or a right time because neither exist and neither ever will. You are a very small thing in a universe that doesn’t exist in the way you want it to, and you don’t exist right. 
Picture yourself in your childhood bedroom, the bedroom of the childhood you didn’t have, the hours upon hours and day’s upon day’s your heart ached to be somewhere else, to not be at all. Picture the photo’s, the ones framed and on the desk, think about them as if they are all you have left, as if they are everything left holding on to. Picture the bathtub in the middle of the tile floor of the bathroom shoved into the corner, picture the white contrasting against the light blue walls, the ones you never repainted like you promised. Picture the dog you never had, the birthday parties, the suffering. The fluttering of the blinds and the wind, the posters on the wall. What do they say to you? What horrific lies do they tell, what promises can’t they keep. It’s not the same feeling as it was when your hair was light blonde and damaged, like the hundreds of sweaters you kept from people you didn’t know and would never see again.
Think about the barking of the dog a few streets down, the high pitched shriek that made your dog go wild. You think you are like that dog, loud and frantic all the time, always bringing others into your own goddamn mess, just like old times. You find solace in the mirror and home in the tips of your fingers that live in the back of your throat, the hard stench of vomit a part of you you will carry forever, however long that happens to be, however long you can stand the idea of breathing. 
“Do you know how to swim?” a stupid question everyone asked when going to the beach or the pool, neither of which meant anything to you back then but they do now, because you thought everyone knew how to swim but not in the way they meant it. You would always laugh and say “yes, of course i know how to swim” you thought they were asking because they didn’t want to be tasked with the hardship and trauma of dragging your bodyweight out of the bottom of the pool because you fucking drowned or some shit. You learn now, drowning, literally, was not the concern. “I hope so, this life will rip your jaw open and build a house in your lungs and drown you from the inside out. So you better swim real good”