Matchstick Heart

I wrote a song. I made it a few weeks ago and I am only writing about it now.

A friend asked if I sing. I do not sing. I never learnt how, and the few times I have tried, it came out as noise. But I know how to write. I know how to take what is inside, turn it over, and shape it into something that makes sense. So that is what I did with this. It is what it is like to be me, put into words and sound rather than left to loop silently in my head.

I am including it here because it is honest, and this is the place for the honest version. It says some things more plainly than I usually let myself.

I learned young how to move like lightning
How to joke before anyone asked
How to fill every silence instantly
Before the silence filled me back

Teachers called it "gifted energy"
Friends said, "Man, I wish I had your drive"
Nobody saw the shaking hands
Or why I never slept at night

Cause my head is a crowded freeway
Every lane on fire at once
And if I slow for even a moment
Something catches up

So I stay burning

I burn too bright for my own skin
Like if I stop I might cave in
Everybody loves the spark
Nobody asks what feeds the dark

I can't sing in tune, I never learned that
Just noise and feeling and keeping it moving
I can make it look like I'm fine
While something in me is losing

I run from quiet like it has teeth
Like it knows my name too well
And every pause feels like a doorway
Straight into myself

So I run
And run
And run
Until my pulse becomes a gun

Everybody says I'm killing it
That's the funny thing
Cause half my life is spent convincing people
I'm not dying underneath

I turn panic into progress
Turn exhaustion into praise
I can make a room believe I'm shining
While I'm burning at the base

And love feels dangerous
Not because I don't want it
But because if somebody held me still
Long enough

They might see it

The missing part
The fractured wire
The animal beneath the charm
The kid who learned achievement
Could keep him warm

I think there's something wrong with me
Not broken bones or visible scars
Just some invisible emergency
Screaming through my heart

And nobody hears it
Because I learned to look alive

So I stay loud
Stay useful
Stay wanted
Stay fast

Cause maybe if I keep moving
The shadows won't attach

But every night
There's five seconds
Right before sleep
Where the noise goes dead

And I swear
I feel my real self
Begging not to be abandoned again

So I burn too bright for my own skin
Like a matchstick trying to be the sun
Everybody loves the heat
Until there's nothing left of anyone

And when the fire finally leaves me
I'm terrified there'll be nothing underneath.

---

I should say plainly what this is about, rather than leave it folded inside the images, because the images only open if you have already read a great deal of the rest of these pages.

It is about functioning. The speed, the jokes, the filling of every silence: none of it is energy in the way people think it is. It is avoidance with good manners. I move fast because if I slow down, the thing I am outrunning gets a chance to land, and the thing I am outrunning is a verdict I have already been handed about myself. I have called that voice the Judge elsewhere. In the song it never speaks; it does not need to. It just waits in the pauses. That is why quiet has teeth, and why a moment of stillness feels like a doorway straight into myself. Most people rest in the quiet. I brace for it.

The matchstick is the whole of it in one picture. A match gives real light and real heat, and it does it by consuming itself, and it cannot stop until it is gone. That is what achievement has been for me: panic turned into progress, exhaustion turned into praise, shame turned into fuel that genuinely works, right up until there is nothing left to burn. The line everyone reads as the bleak is nobody asks what feeds the dark, but the one that frightens me most is the last one. If the burning ever stops, I am not afraid of resting. I am afraid that the burning was all there ever was, and that underneath it there is no one home. And when I do stop, when I actually slow down, it does not feel like rest. It feels like freefall: I fall, then I catch myself, then I fall again, over and over, with the running no longer there to hold me up. That is the part the song is circling. The burning is not the problem so much as the only thing I have found that keeps me from the drop. I do not actually believe that is true. But I have lived a long time as though it were, and the song is the most honest map I have of what that feels like from the inside. I wrote it instead of singing it because writing is the one place I can take the inside out without it coming back as noise.