and darling i will wait for you forever because my brain is too loud and my mouth is too quiet and somehow you make my mouth speak melodies a poet's never dreamt of and my brain hum the tune of silence it only hears in the heartbeat of the dark

he was afraid of the dark until her black eyes and black hair
made him turn  
nocturnal

Step 1: *don’t

you make me feel pink
when all i feel are
the colours that come up
on brain screenings

it's as if somebody taught him how to hold the rope, put the knots in between his hands and told him to squeeze, watched the blood drip from everywhere but his heart, showed him that it was safer that way

it's as if someone taught him how to tie the rope, how to make one knot then two, two loops around the collar bone and under the jaw, as if someone told him that it was better to learn to hate her than to learn to love her because it's safer that way

but it's as if nobody taught him that to every method there's a fallout, didn't teach him that people survive hangings, didn't teach him that i can learn how to tie knots too

kisses that fit together so perfectly you had me thinking heaven must've sent you, fingers intertwining so effortlessly i realised that the storms inside my body were the only natural disasters standing between us, embraces lasting so long i forgot you weren't my home because ******* if you felt like a shelter

but the naivety of passion and the false truths of *** have left me a long time ago and i've come to notice that the storms within me only rage more to coincide with the things getting in between us, even the best anchorman would tell you they were unavoidable when he, merely a body, pushed her away enough to produce a tsunami that kept beating, and beating, and beating her down

maybe i don't want to face the truth because i keep convincing myself that i'm not drowning but whether it's the water filling up from within me to match that hitting me or the fact that my clothes were never prepared to weather this storm doesn't matter because somewhere deep down i know the only protection i need isn't here right now

i should have known you were just a body, a living, breathing organism; i guess it's my fault i tried to make you superhuman

i'm sorry

he took my body and he crafted a home
he held together bones that wouldn't stick and somehow rebuilt the joints so they no longer popped under the weight of anxiety
he grabbed his hammer and hit deep into my chest until my heart knew he was present and he continued to press through until he exposed every bit of my ****** veins and in that moment he didn't run
he pushed himself further and further in until eventually he rebuilt new windows and walls, made a bedroom in my mind and decided to stay there, coming out with every smell of him and every melody that plays in ears designed to hear his name in crevices where nothing is whispered at all
slowly he cut into me with sharp words and melancholy tones until my body was transformed into a house of worship; into a god neither of us believe existed
//
but most important, he took all the maps other people drew in me, all the memories engraved in my chest in my hips in my hands, all the ways in which people got lost and people got scared
and he burned them
he burned them so I could forget what a map looked like and learn what love feels like

and god do i find it ironic how the more i sleep in your shirt the more your scent wears off, almost as if the closer you get to me *the further you pull away

true love isn't verbal communication and even though years and years of watching romcoms has taught me that, i've realised that love is quite the opposite of those hefty i love you's thrown at the end of phone calls and during early morning routines

love is passion. love is fire, pain, angst, and everything in-between. love is the way he looks at you in the middle of his meal and doesn't know how to react when you ask what. love is the way he kisses you harder than you've ever been kissed before in the middle of the dining hall because of the naive belief that maybe that kiss could replace the pain you felt at the time, love is grabbing skin and pulling lips and tightening grips designed to replace words so that maybe you can avoid saying love for a bit longer

love is finding myself in empty streets because i think i saw his reflection, running around in circles in my brain reaching the same **** conclusion that there is no escape route because your mind no longer wants to find one, telling myself that i'm beautiful and throwing in a i wish he could see me and feel proud of an award

but love is also learning to let go. love is telling yourself that perhaps it's better to let them go because somebody told me holding on the rope causes more pain than good and i've finally realised that after all maybe blood in the name of a beating heart isn't okay if spilt for nothing in twisted knots. love is being able to look each other in the eye and tell yourselves that history is history and that you need to move on because it's going nowhere and everywhere and neither of you are prepared for that right now. love is having the spark forever but choosing when to burn it, looking at them months later and seeing it again, deciding years later it's good it ended. love is finding them again in all corners of the world; finding all of them.

but most of all, love is accepting that love will come again.

i don't remember the first time i kissed you but i know for certain it was between when i last called him on the phone and when you took the bobby pins out of my hair and somehow in between that time frame i went from feeling my physical body shrink under the crushing weight of reality to feeling my heart start to rediscover its heartbeat before it completely stopped beating

i don't know when you first started to fall in love with her or when you last looked her in the eyes and decided that leaving would be near impossible to do but all i can say is that if you look at her the way i look at you then maybe i can understand you wanting to go back and i can understand that losing a friend might be worse than losing a lover, but just know that the sunrises we've greeted together will forever be etched in my mind
amidst telling me to be careful there are echoes of you're beautiful's and rooms full of laughter filled from tickles and silly eskimo kisses and even if we were doomed from the beginning and she has your heart entangled in a web strong enough to convince you to leave me know that the soundtrack of all those pink floyd albums we listened to together are always going to remind me of the endless nights we spent together when i was convinced no matter if everything around us burned down we would stay more alive than ever in the fire
i need to be honest with you - i've whispered to countless broken hearts that my eyes cannot reiterate anything others did and no matter how hard my body is squeezed i'll never be able to transform into her when they wake up in the morning, and sometimes i wish i could just because i know you would be happier than ever; maybe happier than i could ever make you; but that doesn't mean that i'll stop trying to make memories of the ashes from something long forgotten
i'll try to build a shelter in your heart to protect it from the storms, i'll try to make you strong enough to face the hail, i'll try to engrave my smile in your clothes so that you can remember we're all imperfect but sometimes even pros aren't faking it, i'll try to show you that hips were made for dancing together in the least likely places, and i'll try to get over my fear of being picked up, i'll try to learn to trust, i'll try to remember that not everyone lies and that maybe, maybe it'll be okay

maybe it wasn't a mistake when our lips clashed together like the way the tide crashes into the sand 46 days ago, maybe it wasn't a coincidence that your couch felt more like my home than my bedroom did, maybe it's not a mistake to give this a try

but, maybe

maybe it is

words are travelling hundreds of miles an hour through my mind and the only one that keeps coming back to the forefront is your name

they'll tell you not to get attached but you need to hold your ground and hope somewhere in between intertwined bodies and black coffee they can understand that you prefer the word passion

lust and love are not synonymous but i've always had a hard time trying to remember that because how can i tell what's what when the breathing is heavy and the movements slow, the mouths full but the bodies hollow

take me and engulf me in a fire so strong ill burn and forget who i am, take me and kiss me so deep ill become convinced you and i are are not two separate people, tell me what you don't want so i can turn around and give it to you, teach me what i've been learning all along, help me forget that i keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over again

when i come back push me away, and when you leave kiss me goodbye

maybe it's because it's 3am and maybe it's because he hasn't truly been with me when beside me in over a month but the more i look at him now the more i realise it's painstakingly easy for him to let go and it's embarrassingly difficult for me to do the same

when i grew up i was taught that love would walk into your life with a smile like no other; i was not taught love would be etched in cigarette butts smoked in earnest after sleepless nights and onto early mornings; i was not taught love would be sprinkled in every glass of red wine i have with the name chianti and the price £6.99 almost haunting every sip i take

the truth is, even when he's not near me i try in earnest to find him - i try to taste him long after he's gone until my mouth goes numb and my tastebuds cannot tell apart chocolate from meat, i try to find the remnants of his cologne in my bedsheets even though it's been a month since he's slept here and i've washed my sheets already because maybe, maybe there's still a chance he'll be there, i try to touch him but no longer on purpose - accidental, timid touches that have my veins screaming to seep out of my arm and grab him while they can because they need more oxygen and he was the only source of clear thinking i had for a long time

the truth is no matter how many times i wear my lucky socks, no matter how many times i buy my favourite shampoo, no matter how many bottles of wine i drink, no matter how many text messages i send, it won't make him come back, because wearing his favourite perfume doesn't change anything but the desire in his eyes and like a flame it burns bright and suddenly all within a matter of hours it stops shining altogether

call it naive, call it pathetic, call it lonely call it lost call it depressed call it wrong call it meaningless pointless tragic sad ignorant poisonous stupid, but my heart trudges forward, and i know at 03:48am that no matter how much i try, i won't be able to stop it until it has taken all the roads leading up to him

why?

so it can crash and die all over again

and perhaps it's in the moment we realise that we smile with every perfectly crafted moment our lips collide and cause our skin to become tainted in goosebumps because we cannot believe how incredibly lucky we are that we realise yes, i am falling in love

they warned me not to play with fire
but the way that our love burned was just too beautiful to leave alone
and so i struck matches on each flicker and hoped that i could keep the fire burning for a bit longer
but eventually the rain came and i was left matchless
unable to salvage what we created

maybe you fell in love with my smile first even though I hate it, because when you told me I was beautiful it was the first time I smiled in a long time

and maybe you fell in love with my eyes next, because they're a new level of intensity - a new level of madness

and maybe you fell in love with my words last, because those late night whispers were just what you needed when your world was crashing down before you

----------------------------------------------------

maybe you started to hate my laugh first, because you realized most of the time it's fake and I'm not the happy person you need

maybe you began to let go of my hair next, because th knots tied too thickly around your fingers and that's not romantic, that's not ****

maybe you slowly started to despise my words later, because you began to let go of romantic gestures and left me alone to utter my poems in the dark

love changes


you're changing