Her hair intertwined between her fingers.
In another world, her eyes are rolled back,
her lips blue and numb, laying on a silk bed
in a city called Swanzania.
In another world she is fighting off dragons and goblins,
clenching her fists as tears roll down her cheek.
But when she really closes her eyes,
she dreams of living in a blue cottage on the edge of Alaska,
hugging her husky named Cooper by the fireplace.
Maybe in another eternity
she is holding hands with a prince,
overlooking the Himalayas on a park bench.
Or maybe she could've been a math genius
with parents that cared too much.

She sighed and watched the clock tick by.
The cracks on the wall traced the ceiling
like the bags under her eyes.
In her reflection she saw her small chin and chapped lips.
Pursing them together,
she curled her mouth into a slight smile.
She looked in the mirror,
and scoffed at the freckles crawling across her face
and her nose that was an infection that couldn't be cured.
Maybe if she held her breath, it would all go away.
Maybe if she masked her face with a smile
the stench of cigarettes and alcohol would fade away from the living room.

“Maybe if I don't open my eyes,
It won't be there anymore.” she whispered.
She floats through time unaware of the excruciating pain
she hides in her back pocket.
Tear stained pillows and cold fingers are now things she see everyday.
She can't get the images of her mother screaming and crying out of her head.

She watches her mom fill her lungs
with heavy weights that spilled out of tiny rolled up cigarettes.

Her father is gone and she has nobody to talk to so
she bites her lip and watches her life fall apart before her eyes.

Like a chain reaction, she sees the cards fall on top of
each other like dominos, and she knew it was eventually
going to end, slowly, tipping over and collapsing onto her.

Ruffled skirts and shiny bicycles,
that’s something she wished she had in 5th grade.
But instead, she got a drunk mother as a birthday gift,
and a party for 2 at the age of 10.
Maybe if she wasn’t so scared,
she could tell her mom how she really felt.
Maybe if it wasn't so hard for her to leave the house,
she would be able to find the courage to make friends.
Maybe if she wished hard enough
she would wake up to
one of the many fantasies that she dreamed about before crawling into bed.

Fairytale pocketbooks and silver heart necklaces
trailed down her arms as she wished for a reality that didn’t exist.