Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Feb 2014
i like everything about you just the way you are as you are when i met you. point blank.

i don’t have any preconception of who you feel you once were but aren’t now, that you wish you still were. that person doesn’t exist in my mind. the past doesn’t settle into my conscious. it’s just faint musings of something that doesn’t seem real or tangible to reality.

the person you currently loathe, i adore. the person you pine after, i feel nothing for other than what i feel about you now, because i don’t see him and you as separate or different selves the way you do. you are you. no matter what you perceive yourself as being, you are yourself perfectly.

and yet at the same time actually, i see you as very separate internally, with the work you’ve been doing, even if you don’t totally see that yet, because i know if him and i met when he existed in that state of mind we have both previously occupied in loneliness, neither of us would have been able to make sense of the other the way we can now. we both would have been too lost.

if that makes any sense. self vs internal self. treading water vs being swallowed alive. together vs loneliness. you vs a shell of who you are now.

it’s such a complicated balancing act but i wouldn’t have it any other way. when we backslide we are betraying no one but ourselves, even when it feels like we’re accomplishing and internalizing something greater than ourselves. we’re emptying our lives with our bodies, and it’s not fair to the selves we’re struggling to keep intact now for us to do that. we have things to live for. you have things to live for.

i like you now, not then. even if you see things flipped around. i don’t see any see-saw or scale that tips or drops to equal self-acceptance, nowadays with this disorder, i just see an hourglass. i know. i know it’s not that simple. but you’re the only one who sees value in what was. the people who love you now don’t see that, only how it has hurt and tortured you for far too long, and how much the person you are right now deserves to be free of it.
Claire Waters
Written by
Claire Waters  -
(-)   
Please log in to view and add comments on poems