Bittersweet Tranquility

By Lexi Jones

Timid contentment with a bit of a peacefully panicked edge.

A twisted duality of ambivalent emotions falls into a sense of quiet defeat.

The fire inside me crackles and pops with the yearning for serenity,

As my exterior shakes, hungry for the next move my body will make.

I long for my mind to think real thoughts,

Mental pictures that don’t bring me back to times of chaos, misery, hopelessness.

My people are my tribe,

My people are my confidants,

My people are my traitors,

My people are my betrayers.

I love to love them, and they love to hate me.

Pinpricks of distaste, showing cold affection.

Yet, I love them plenty, despite their adoring deception.

Now I’ve grown into fragility,

A stem of what I could’ve been.

Haunted by my past,

Never forgotten but coerced into forgiveness.

I have to forgive the torture, don’t I?

I have to excuse what’s already been done,

For the sake of my sanity,

For the sake of who I’ve become, what I deserve to be.

I hate it. I hate me.

But the world is so beautiful.

I’m not naive to be able to see that.

It’s obvious.I see the blue skies, the green trees, the yellow sun beaming on me.

The problem is that I can see how it is beautiful,

Not that it is.

Why?

I’ve developed calloused emotional regulations,

Insecurity.

Yet a matured soul,

An evolved mind that drives me out of my mind.

I don’t try to talk about it, I keep it all to myself.

No one deserves to know,

For they shouldn’t have to carry the baggage I was forced to carry myself.

Though, it’s becoming too heavy,

The mask is making my face sweaty.

But, I’ve always been thirsty for the connection others seem to easily obtain.

All of my walls, my complications,

Have deprived me of forming pure and comfortable relations.

I’m going in circles, I’m just too much,

And I’m going down a rabbit hole of depressed thoughts.

I should just STOP.

I should. I should. I should.

But why the fuck should I?

Don’t I deserve more?

Am I not worthy?

I’m asking you,

Because of my incapacity to believe so myself.

As I speak, as I say my truth,

I am calm.

I am scared. No, terrified.

But I am calm.

My future is uncertain,

My demise’s clock continues to count down,

It is unknown, but there.

I am calm.

Bittersweet tranquility.

I don’t cry anymore.

It’s not that I can’t,

It’s not that I won’t.

Tears represent sadness.

I’m not sad.

I am more, yet less.

I am calm, but that’s what they need me to be.

Right?

My reality has been displayed,

My so-called feelings have been portrayed.

Yet the thread is unraveling,

Not in a dramatic way,

But in a quiet, subtle shift.

Everybody notices, but nobody really knows.

The cracks are too minuscule for the naked eye to see.

But they’re there,

Growing wider with each faked smile.

I’ve learned to fake the calm,

To dance in a stillness that feels like a lie.

To nod when I don’t agree,

To speak when I have nothing to say,

To stand in rooms filled with noise,

And pretend my mind isn’t screaming,

Pretend I’m not drowning in the silence that follows each conversation I have with everybody and nobody.

I want to tell them,

I need to tell them,

But what if they know I’m fragile,

That I’m one step from breaking,

One word away from spilling everything,

Even when I don’t even understand half of how I am.

Who I am.

I’m buried so deep

And call it “peace.”

So I keep it inside,

All of it.

The quiet terror.

The longing for connection,

The desperate need to feel seen

Without the fear of rejection.

I’m hiding from myself, In truth.

And I will explode,

But I don’t.

I can’t.

I won’t.

So I stay calm.

I stay quiet.

I stay in this bittersweet limbo—

Too much, but never enough.

The fire inside me still burns,

But I don’t let it scorch my skin.

I keep it contained.

I keep it buried.

And maybe that’s the hardest part—

Not the feeling.

But the silence that follows.