Burning the Candle at Both Ends - Poetry

by Mirel Adler, MSW, LSW

It's the numbness that feels scary, the slow creeping frost on the tips of what you got burning at both ends and a third end you didn't even realize this candle had. 

It's the realization in the half wake of yet another mad and really bad nightmare that the bubble you exist in is a horror movie on steroids.

The embedders, picking at their scars, alongside the cutters showcasing their madness like trophies, tattered, shattered, completely hopeless - in and out of surgical suites, too young to label, but don't you think - can't you tell they are borderline personality disordered? And what do you suggest is the prognosis for that? They will wear themselves out trying to fill the bottomless need for attention, ratcheting their behaviors to levels that might shake and move their burned out family and shredded support system. 

Wear themselves out??? Maybe in their late 30s or even early 40s when comet like, they will finally arrive at the tail end of every relationship and find themselves quite anticlimactically and undramatically without an audience. But they are 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds now and with the constant self harm they would be lucky if they make it to 30, without dying stupidly, accidentally of an attention seeking ploy gone wrong.

There are the schizophrenics, and schizoaffectives, the severely traumatized, the word "trauma" seems like a neatly packaged and cleaned up way to describe total chaos and unpredictability. 

It's unfair.

Friday night at dinner, I'm safe at home with family and friends, and faces lit by the glow of Shabbat candles they look at me and don't see the disinterest, the numbness that follows a week of despair.

You want to make love to me? Which part of me? There must be areas of my skin that still find ways to breathe. 

I used to know this body that I lug around, back bent, shoulders hunched, feet leaden, carrying the crippling burdens of lives that exist on the outer periphery of most average folks' imaginations. 

Yes, they say, there is nothing that you can't get used to! The human spirit is resilient. 

You can find in yourself, in the husk of the me today, the glitter, the fairy dust, the leftover of that birthday sparkler that in my youth and idealism I squandered, on everyone and everything. Flirting with flames, dripping onto the unaware recipients of my generosity, the very essence of my core spirit. 

You see me and there is some vestige in my eyes of the allure, the call to adventure that starts you dreaming...what if I can get to her somehow!! 

This letter is for you, darling, for the way that you look at my bruised and battered self and see only birthday sparkler, glowing effervescence of what is left of the comet, dimmed but not gone. 

The halo...remains. 

I wait in the darkness.

Mirel Adler, MSW, LSW, is a social worker in Camden, NJ.