it isn't supposed to be this way.

I don’t know how I feel about a lot of things.
I don’t know how to make all these certain thoughts go away.
I don’t know how to make them flee
or even concentrate them down to a singular thing.
I don’t know the reasons for a lot of them
and I can’t assign meaning to all of them.
Some of it makes sense, but mostly in the way that
a shirt fits right until you stretch a particular direction
and suddenly it’s too tight around the shoulders.

I think that maybe I don’t know how to actually change my heart.
I think that I want to be new but I think I do it wrong.
God made me new, but I don’t know how to make the old go away,
or sometimes I don’t know how to shed the old me
because I won’t let go of the only thing I know.

Maybe I have, a little, every now and then.
Maybe over small increments of time, there are an
infinite amount of microscopic pieces of skin flaking off to
reveal a new, shiny, pink skin underneath.
Maybe I just haven’t had a chance to see the scar.

I can only see my bloodstained fingertips and
feel the phantom bumps of scabs and
smell the wretched stink of my necrotic soul.

It’s a veil and it seems to cloak my body.
I look down and I don’t see the blood of Christ.
I see the wounds of someone trying too hard
and failing.
I see the sores of someone killing himself
trying to live.
I look in and I don’t see a new creation.
Instead, I see the product of the past and the
stains of someone else’s decisions.

It’s strange even, because I know that it isn’t
supposed to be this way.
Living isn’t supposed to be killing myself
over and again.
Why do I expect to see a scar and
why are my hands still covered in blood?
I know that it isn’t supposed to be this way;
I’m not made by being destroyed.
If there are microscopic pieces of skin flaking off of me
over small increments of time, wouldn’t that mean
that like He made science to say, I’m all kinds of new
all the time?
Wouldn’t that mean that I’m new skin and hair
and nails and cells in my liver and bones?
Instead, I don’t know how to think of me as new skin and
liver and bones;
I see myself as new, shiny, pink skin
raised and misshapen and tearing across an otherwise decent, unblemished surface
like a scar ripped into a place where it doesn’t belong.

And I have to check myself, because I know this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
Something inside me sometimes whispers

of course that isn’t you;
you’ve changed;
this isn’t you;
you’re heart is singing a different tune;
you know the Truth.

The whole lie is on me.
I can call it out like it’s my family,
but I keep drinking it in.
Like a seven year sober man faces a glass of scotch
and wants to have just one drink.
I know why I quit and I know what it feels like.
I know it’s not me any longer.

And yet,
I drink.

I squeeze my eyes shut at the burn and
I tip it all back at once so that it’ll go down
quick and without thought.
Just once.

But then.

And before I know it, I’ve traded my scotch for misery
and I’ve forgotten my resolution.