Sam & I AM

I arrive in pieces no one can hold,
a glint of warmth in a world too cold.
Each fragment hums your name through haze,
rehearsing love in borrowed ways.
I bend into colors you can stand to see,
reshape the silence that once shaped me.
I call it love when I disappear,
a ghost who smiles when you draw near.
Inside, a room without a chair,
walls whisper secrets to the air.
I wait for footsteps soft and kind,
for someone real enough to find.
My name tastes different every day,
depending on who looks my way.
I wear their tone beneath my skin,
and call it safety, not a sin.
I trace the outline, then erase,
build new bones inside your face.
I lose myself so you’ll remain,
a mercy carved from quiet pain.
The surface hums, I press, I stay,
leaving fingerprints that fade away.
Little half-moons, crimson-stained,
proof that something once remained.
You’d never know how much I change
to keep my edges out of range.
Each name I wear begins to bleed,
a different truth for every need.
I speak in echoes, never first,
mirroring comfort, hiding thirst.
Each voice becomes my borrowed skin,
each silence pulls the fracture in.
Some nights, I am made of glass,
transparent enough for light to pass.
Other nights, the dark gets through,
and I forget which one is true.
I dream of stillness, but I sway,
a candle learning not to stay.
The wax remembers every burn,
but still it drips and starts to yearn.
And though I fade between each breath,
somehow I have not met death.
For every reflection that breaks, I mend,
I am the glass that breathes again.

Artist’s Note:
This piece was born from the quiet chaos of living with borderline personality disorder. Where emotions are oceans and identity shifts with the tide. It’s not meant to define BPD, but to feel it. The way love can blur into loss, and self-hood can fracture in the name of belonging.
The glass in this poem is both the mirror and the wound. Transparent enough to reveal, fragile enough to break, and somehow still breathing. Each stanza moves through the ache of being seen and unseen, loved and left, whole and hollow all at once.
I wanted to capture the tenderness that survives inside the disorder. The part that still reaches for connection, even when it cuts. Because BPD isn’t just chaos; it’s also the desperate hope that even shattered things can shine.