i. I am sixteen years old, with an increasingly curved spine and blood so thick it doesn't reach my fingers and shoulders so weak they fall apart at the slightest pressure, much like I do at the mention of your name.
ii. You see, when I was six years old I may have been a toothpick girl but at least I was healthy and the first time I remember feeling like maybe my body wasn't quite right was when your smile first touched mine.
iii. These things get worse with time and I think that's why I was so determined I was never in love with you, why now it's gotten to the point where I can remember the bruises your words left and I can't help but miss them because you left a part of yourself in me, somewhere under my tongue or in the base of my skull where I fear I will never be able to get it out.
iv. It's been nearly three years since I first felt the brand of your name on my heart and I guess I'm a slow cooker because it's just now that I'm realizing that even if it never could have worked, what I was trying to convince myself was puppy love was most likely full-fledged and strong and unlikely to ever appear in my life again.
v. Who else will write me love letters in different pens so I could read the color coded poems you hid in them? Who else will call me, drunk and fifteen years old and crying because you've let me down?
vi. I'm not sure I will ever be able to remove your touch from my wrists or my cheeks even though the skin you touched is just thousands of dust particles by now. Your touch is scattered on the air I breathe and perhaps that's why I can't escape you.
vii. Perhaps that's why my body is broken; it's to make up for when my heart never was.
Feb 17, 2014
Feb 17, 2014 at 1:02 AM UTC
I am not an original and that is exactly my problem. I fall in love with types of people I've never seen before, people with interesting names and scars and stories, people whose eyes or hair or hands are unforgettable, people who speak and leave their words stamped onto the edges of your ribs and the tissues of your brain, people who are so unapologetically who they are that it's impossible not to be intoxicated by them. And I am. Intoxicated, I mean. I meet these people and become fixated on the way their necks flow into their shoulders and the way their knuckles are scarred from the kind of accomplishments I will never know and the way that they are so different from anything I know. I meet these people, so many of them, and at the end of the day I lie on my floor trying and failing not to fall apart because I can't get them out of my system and I will never be in theirs. They are so unapologetically who they are, and I apologize for every word that comes out of my mouth and every gesture I make. When I was younger I just wanted to be accepted, so I tried so hard to be like everyone else and now that I want to be my own person, I can't. I am a repeat of every song I have ever heard, an echo of every word ever said to me, a copy of every book I have ever read. I am walking plagiarism, and that fact of my existence is what causes me to tear myself apart in a useless effort to build myself up to something new.
Jan 22, 2014
Jan 22, 2014 at 10:32 PM UTC
this is dumb
and I am dumb
but I can't stop thinking about you
and it's ridiculous because I will
never know the feeling of
your collarbones under my fingertips
or the heat of your cheek close to mine
and it's masochistic to continue letting
these dreams fill my head but
your smile makes it better and
though you'll never let me be yours
I can't convince myself
to stop thinking of you as mine.
Jan 4, 2014
Jan 4, 2014 at 2:30 AM UTC
I'm sitting in the library before school,
talking and laughing like any other day
when you reach over and pick up
a book on overcoming anorexia.
You hold the nonthreatening orange-and-purple cover in your hands
that I once thought were gentle
and scoff, saying, "People with anorexia are so stupid."
Our friends sitting around us agree
and laugh and joke about it
while I sit in mute horror and suppressed panic
and dig my fingernails into my skin
until someone asks
why I'm not laughing.
Why am I not laughing?
I am not laughing at the disease
that consumed my life for nearly a year,
that ripped and clawed its way into my mind
and through my veins
like an addiction,
like a freight train gone off the tracks,
out of control and spinning
and uprooting everything crucial and meaningful
and burying it it flames,
turning it to ashes.
I am not laughing
at the nights I spent crying
and hating myself
while I felt the lining of my stomach
try to consume itself
in a poor replacement of the
sustenance I was denying myself
while I again dug my fingernails into my skin,
pins holding a dead butterfly
to its morbid display.
I am not laughing
at the thoughts that constantly filled my head
of death and disaster and pain
of wishing them upon myself
of making them happen
of letting myself shrink
and shed the space
that I believed I did not deserve to occupy.
I am not laughing at the thoughts
that after two years still plague me-
is my stomach sticking out?
do you really deserve breakfast?
your thighs are too big
your hips too wide
I count fewer ribs each day
you are fat
fatfatfatfatfatfat
worthless fat useless fat pathetic fat
you deserve to die
fat.
I am not laughing
at my choice
of slow suicide
that I made the
agonizing choice
to save myself from.
I am not laughing
at the book that I myself read
at every torturous bite of food I took
at every painful step of recovery.
I am not laughing
because I will not take away
every moment I felt strong for not relapsing,
every prayer I pled
every tear I shed,
every time I decided that I did not want to die
anymore.
I am not laughing.
I am leaving.
Dec 30, 2013
Dec 30, 2013 at 4:10 PM UTC
i have 79 freckles on my body
and 63 scars
and i'm waiting to find the person
who will love them all the same
Dec 29, 2013
Dec 29, 2013 at 1:53 AM UTC
it's a terrible pattern we've fallen into:
i tear my heart open
hoping that you will do the same
and am only met with disdain
in your light eyes that hold more darkness
than i'd ever like to know
or I beg you to look at the stars with me
but you just turn your head
and close your lavender eyelids
in a childish move to spite me
in the ways you know it will
when i smile at you
you look away
and that's how i know
you never meant to stay
Dec 28, 2013
Dec 28, 2013 at 2:04 AM UTC
I'm obsessed with other people's hands
because they're beautiful
and maybe it's because mine aren't.
It's the same way that I look at other girls' legs
and noses and teeth and shoulders
and spines and fingernails.
It's the same way that I watch sunsets and snow and starlight and street lamps
and fireflies and clouds and storms.
it's the same way I love you.
Dec 25, 2013
Dec 25, 2013 at 3:26 AM UTC
1.
my hands won't stop shaking, and I like to pretend it's
because they are filled with the stardust of your words
and infused with the chemicals of your skin
2.
you haven't spoken to me in weeks and haven't touched
me in even longer
3.
I also pretend that the twinkling lights all around
represent each of our promises
4.
in a few days' time, the lights will be gone and put away
(an echo of our plans)
5.
I see you in the glint of sunlight on the cornfields and the
glow of the moon when I'm still awake at three in the
morning and the slope of the mountains that trap us in this
town together and in the curve of my own lips
6.
the lips that I'm starting to believe you didn't think about
kissing as much as I thought about kissing yours
7.
most of all, I see you in the emptiness of the fog each
morning
8.
I have to stop myself from thinking your name
9.
all my plans must be scratched out of my
furnishings and a new layer carved on
10.
I'm scared because I don't know how to be me
without you
Dec 24, 2013
Dec 24, 2013 at 4:25 AM UTC
people always seem astonished
when others take their pain
and make it into art
"she took something terrible
and turned it into something beautiful,"
they say
they do not understand that for those artists,
it is the only way
that to take the paintbrush, the camera, the pen
and try to express
the horrible things that are in their heads
is the only way they can hope
to escape their demons and feel safe in their beds
they do not understand
that the pained and the afflicted
do not turn their pain to art
so it can be sugarcoated
and underappreciated
people need to understand
that others take their pain
and turn it into art
to make it go away
Dec 23, 2013
Dec 23, 2013 at 7:58 PM UTC
you called me for the first time
at one in the morning
you laughed and told me I was beautiful
and that you loved me
then you lowered your rough voice to a whisper and said,
"i'm drunk," making my heart sink to my stomach
and then to the floor when you finished off with,
"who am I speaking to?"
Dec 22, 2013
Dec 22, 2013 at 2:40 AM UTC