I get panic attacks when I'm being looked at
I get hungry in crowds
I eat potato chips to crunch away the noise
The noise is not noise if I am the one who is in control of the loud

I'm a lot three years old
You can't see me if I close my eyes
You have no idea where I am
I guarantee I am somewhere thinking about the people who choose the middle seat on an airplane
When our elbows touch my heart goes so fast
I dare myself to not pull away
It's the point of life
Don't let anyone tell you different
The point of life is increasing the amount of time you can get your elbow to stay

My joy likes to run from my body quick as it can
I've been practicing holding it
The way you'd practice holding your breath at a public pool
I can do about half a lap before my panic freaks out and its little red whistle
My panic is not a lifeguard
but you can't tell my panic that
My panic googled how to give CPR to yourself

Despite how it might look I was raised right
My father is a good man
When I asked him why he stayed three years in Vietnam
He told me the army offered him a free trip to France if the stayed the extra year
When he left the room my mother said no Andrea that is not true
Your father stayed the extra year so his brother wouldn't have to go
When I came out to my parents they took me to a psychiatrist to get my head fixed
The psychiatrist said I am not responsible for my family's happiness
But my father's brother is a happy man
It was a lot to lose

I never nightmared so much as a I did those years
I was at a Catholic school playing basketball for the Lady Monks
I was taking environmental science from a nun who did not believe in dinosaurs
What I knew about extinction
Was that my family stopped calling
And I started working demolition
And volunteered to run the jackhammer through the asbestos tiles on the building's floor

When I finally got my degree the only job I could find
was as a telemarketer selling a product called Score
a cologne guaranteed to get any man laid in the club
There are times when your life is not on the up-swing
And no one was saying it was gonna get better
When they said straighten up man, they meant straighten up
but some of us can't help but jackknife out of the net

Some of us know love is not the only closet
we were told never to come out of
There is also the closet of grief
The closet of sorrow
The closet of panic, of terror, of rage
The closet of awe, and want, and bliss
Every honest grit that we feel
This world asks for a stencil instead
for the chatter of cordial manufactured machine
And yet here we are daring our elbows
out-noising the noise
Forgiving the past for not being the past
making no excuses for wanting to feel too much
There is no tragedy that doesn't knock the wind out of us
But we, we follow that wind where it goes
Running with our wind chimes dragging behind us
like we were just married
To knowing the breakdown is what trampolines the bouncing back
Call my ring finger, whatever I use to flip off the rules
of how my feelings are supposed to, supposed to, supposed to act

I am always a groom with a heavy, heavy heart
Just learning to pull my own weight
Without wishing my past weighed less than it does
Learning brave is a hand me down suit
from terrified as hell
Dress me in whatever will get me to the door of my heart
Get my faith in us under your skin
Hold my stubborn in the palm of your free
Tell whoever is sitting beside you tonight
Thank God you never got braces
Your bite looks like a city skyline
I bet you leave that kind of mark on this world