On New Year’s Eve I looked at you
And my heart blew up in my chest
It wasn’t love at first sight
You had always been a constant in my life
But that night you laughed
And it was like seeing you for the first time

I haven’t found a way to stop finding you beautiful
It’s been months but you’re still the only thing that I can think of
Everything reminds me of you

I find pieces of you in everyone that I meet
My barista has your hair
A stranger on the street has your smile
Your brother has your eyes
I couldn’t escape you if I wanted to

But while I was lost in you
You found a girl whose voice is honey
A girl that probably fell in love with you the moment she saw you
She makes you radiate sunshine
How can I compete with perfection?

It may not have been love at first sight
But it’s been you ever since
And maybe that’s as close as I’ll get to loving you
Spending nights listening to music in your car
Laughing until we cry as the sun comes up
I wouldn’t trade it for anything
You made my world stop
But without you I don’t know how to make it go again

When I was sixteen I fell in love with a girl
Who looked like autumn
Long wavy hair the colour of maple leaves
Freckles on her cheeks scattered like raindrops on grass
She felt like home in ways I could never understand

Rose petal lips and silk skin
She had silver knives hidden as collarbones in her chest
They didn’t hurt me until she left
That summer I broke my own heart for her

Falling in love with her was easy
But accepting it was so much harder
She made me feel things I wasn’t supposed to feel

The first time she kissed me was magic
She ghosted her lips across mine
And I didn’t know it had happened
Until it was over
I can still taste the coffee from her lips

My autumn girl
Your heart was filled with wild flowers
You said you’d never change the world
But in one summer you changed mine
To this day I don’t remember how to get back to where I was without you

We were fifteen
Writing stories in our skin with long nails and steak knives
Girls in my friend group would starve themselves for fun
My girlfriend used to tell me that she overdosed
Just to see how I would react

Sometimes I’m surprised we’re all still living
Maybe not alive but not dead either
I still spend most of my nights crying
Growing up is funny like that

At twenty I question how any of us made it through highschool
My old friends survive off of little pink pills and Smirnoff
You could drink ***** out of their collar bones
I can see the sadness in their bones, visible through translucent skin
How were we better off at fifteen

I still can’t smell blood without wanting to throw up
Jagged skin makes me nostalgic for a love I never should’ve had
Whenever I see a tombstone I think of him

At seventeen a teacher asked what I wanted to be
How badly I wanted to say happy
I never imagined I’d make it past eighteen

You found a sunflower girl
With golden hair and freckles on her cheeks
She won your heart and then broke mine
I want to hate her but I can’t
With eyes so blue they put the summer sky to shame
I can see why you fell for her

Her eyelashes are long, reaching towards the sun
They flutter as she looks up at you and smiles
In that moment I almost fall in love with her myself

I promised myself I’d never get in the way of your happiness
But she shines so bright
I can’t see clearly anymore
She’s made a fool of me and she doesn’t even know it
I want to hate her but I despise myself instead
Why did it have to be her

You like Queen more than anyone I’ve ever met
I broke my own heart
And now Freddie Mercury sings me to sleep each night

I can’t let you go
Even though I never had you to start with
I’ll trick myself into thinking you could possibly love me

You’ve got blonde hairs in your car but they’re not mine
Her dye job looks better than my genetics ever did
You replaced me with someone better
I am the before photo and she is the after
She plays me better than I ever could

I never thought of the smiths as romantic before I met you
But one day you laughed and daisies sprouted in my chest
Now I can’t stop listening to Morrissey

At nineteen I broke my own heart
You mended it with kindness
And as we rang in the new year I bloomed for you

Within nine months I was a flower garden
But then September came
My flowers died from the cold
Meanwhile you were growing flowers in another girl’s garden
And I was too blind to see you never planted any in mine at all

Tonight I’ll dream of lavender
Of fields filled with flowers
And a boy with ocean blue eyes
Who keeps his promise when he says he’ll never hurt me

It’s only at night that I allow myself to think of you
You are my filthiest thoughts
Of nights filled with laughter
Stolen kisses and sideways glances
I think about how badly I want you to touch me

Touch my hand in a dark room
Squeeze my knee in the car
Brush your fingers against my spine when we’re shopping
I don’t care what you do as long as you mean it

Tonight you’ll tell me that you love me
I’ll wake up before I get to answer
The sun shining through my blinds,
a reminder of what will never be

In my dreams you ask to kiss me
Your voice thick like honey
I say yes, sweet as sugar
I wake up and still feel the ghost of your lips on mine

Tonight I’ll beg for a nightmare
Anything to keep you off of my mind
I can’t keep loving you deeply
Breaking my own heart is a daily occurrence
I don’t have enough in me to keep from falling apart

You want me to be your manic pixie dream girl
So today I am a gardener
I’ll plant daisies and you can put them in my hair

Tomorrow you’ll fall in love with the freckles on my nose
I’ll make you sing along to bands you’ve never heard of
We’ll stop on the side of a highway to watch the sunset
I’ll remind you of what it feels like to be alive

You tell me to be a supporting character in your great adventure
So I’ll tag along behind you
Make you stop and look at bugs on the sidewalk
You’ll love the way I’m not like other girls

I’ll get a tattoo of a flower on my ribs
You’ll call me amaryllis
And I’ll change my name because you want me to
I’ll be the garden you grow with your green thumb
The one you show off to your friends
Make them bask in my beauty until you feel better about yourself

Eventually I’ll lose my shimmer
No more golden glitter, just dust
You’ll write the final chapter of my life
Give me the unsuspecting ending you believe I deserve
Stuff me in a suitcase and bury me in the backyard
Make everyone believe I ran away
Chasing a romanticized version of life I could never give

Love is so foreign to me that I don’t know how to recognize it
I often mistaken love for kindness
And kindness for pity

Love is a language I’ve always wanted to learn
but will never speak

Your love was nostalgia
When you were around I longed for the old me
The girl who knew how to differentiate loneliness
from butterflies

One rainy night you grabbed my hand
It felt like a hundred bee stings
and I mistook it for a spark
I thought the shock running through my body was love
When it was only lightning

Love is a song I remember the  melody to
But mess up when singing the chorus
The foundation is there
but I always forget the correct words to fill in the empty spaces

You begged me to save you
So I cracked myself open
I unzipped my skin and stepped out of my body
I allowed you to inhabit me, use me for shelter
I’ve always been the person people climb into when they need to be saved

The worst part of swallowing you whole was the stomach ache
You were too much for my body to handle
Soon after you abandoned me in the middle of the night  

The hardest part was trying to fit back into my skin again
You stretched it out and now it’ll forever feel too big
My body is a hand me down I’ll never fully fill out
It’s been five years but I still feel like a thief in a strangers house
Unsure if I’ll ever get to come home

At nineteen I allowed myself
To break my own heart
How silly I was to believe little girls could fall in love
But then you were there

When you tried to talk to me I couldn’t speak
Anytime I tried daisies bloomed out of my mouth

On New Year’s Day you became a gardener
You plucked away the green vines that grew from my tongue
Soon after there was a flower patch inside of my ribs

But charity love only lasts for so long
Eventually you’ll grow tired of grooming someone else’s garden
I mistook friendship for love
The look in your eyes was never longing
Now my flowers are wilting

When flowers die they decompose
Becoming the foundation for new life
By sacrificing themselves to winter
They pave the path to growth

You made me a flower garden
This winter I will let myself die
and when spring comes I will bloom again
I’ve never been so thankful to be broken

When I was fifteen
You made a home in my bones
Now every summer flowers
Grow out of my ribs

When I was seventeen a garden
Grew inside of me
I couldn’t breathe
Through the daisies in my lungs
But your eyes were sunlight
I couldn’t live without

I’m twenty now
My flowers have wilted
The garden is overgrown
With weeds
Everything I touch dies
My green thumb is gone

It’s been over two years
Since my garden has had sunlight
I’m beginning to forget
What it felt like
It’s harder to breathe
Through wilted flowers
Than fresh roses
I didn’t think it could be harder
Than when I was seventeen

I am not a gardener
But neither were you
Yet you filled my bones with flowers
Now I don’t know
How to keep them alive
You never left an instruction manual
On how to survive
In the winter