often times

when I am laying alone at night

I feel his presence with me

and my love for him is overwhelming

it beats within my chest

so hard I worry it may break my heart

He asked me if my heart is tired
I told him it is
But those who are tired eventually wake
My tired heart will be just fine

What a beautiful gift to have the ability to be happy in the hardest of times

When you're involved with someone, you slowly collect these little pieces of their life. The 40 minute break that they have between their classes on Tuesdays. The amount of sugar that they like in their coffee. The time that they wake up for work on Monday mornings. The side of the bed that they prefer to sleep on. And then this day comes when everything comes to an end. However, these little pieces stay with you. You feel so incredibly empty while you drown in the fragments of their day-to-day life. Suddenly, you find yourself wandering around aimlessly for 40 minutes on Tuesday afternoons. You don't put sugar in your coffee anymore. You sleep in on Monday mornings. You lay in the center of your Queen-sized bed. You float around in this uncomfortable space between the life you lived before and the life you shared with this person and their little pieces. You float here for a while as you try and get back to a life that is all yours again. A life that is familiar and forever different. And you know that this will happen time and time again, you will repeat this agonizing process of building up and tearing down and rebuilding until that one day, where nothing comes to an end.

They asked me what happened. They asked me what went wrong. For a long time I wondered the exact same thing. Where did everything go so wrong? Lots of things went wrong in the passing time of our breaking love. But the truth? The very painful truth to our final collapse is this: I could no longer stand by and watch him slowly **** himself while we both pretended that nothing was wrong. Every morning that we woke up, I woke up beside someone who was wishing that they didn't, and it ripped my heart out of my chest and threw it onto the floor while the sun streamed through the windows. Watching him be unhappy was the hardest thing I ever had to do because into my eyes he could admit he wanted to die, and still walk away and refuse to do anything about it. Some people may disagree with my choice to leave him. He certainly did. Abandonment is what he called it. However, I put my everything into trying to mend his broken heart, while in the process I was ruining mine. I would not let us both be broken. God, did I ever love him so much that it almost killed me. You can say that I did a lot of things, but abandoning was not one of those things. I couldn't wake up one more morning holding my breath hoping that he was still breathing.

Chloe Elizabeth

The painful truth that I could not bring myself to tell him is that I cannot bear to be with someone who is unhappy. I could no longer look into his eyes and search for happiness that was not there. I could no longer fall asleep in is arms to wake up in the morning knowing that he would rather not wake at all. I could no longer wait for the day to come when he discovers what it means to be happy, because I am already there and I could no longer slow my pace waiting for him to catch up. Life started to stand still as I found myself engulfed in a person that was not capable of giving me what I really wanted from them, and as much as they told me I did, I could not give them what they needed either: happiness. Upon this realization, I had to let go. I had to say goodbye. All I can hope is that one day, one day soon, he will not have to pray for his life to have meaning, he will realize that it already does.

Goodbye J.S.

By Chloe Elizabeth

This isn't going to be much of a poem, just a thought; something that I was thinking about today.
I was asked if it was weird to have dated my ex, since he was 5'5, one inch shorter than I am. And you know what, I've dated professional go-kart racers, jujitsu gold medalists and kick boxers, yes, all much taller than I am, however, none of them made me feel as safe as my 5'5 hockey player did. So the answer to that question, which actually surprised me as well, is no. It was not weird. It was not anything but another relationship, with another boy, who proved to be much more than how tall he was. Height does not matter to me and I don't see it ever mattering because he made me feel just as loved as someone twice his size could have. And even though he turned out to be a complete *******, that was not because of his small size, that was because he was, and is, a ****** person. Case closed.

By Chloe Elizabeth

Day after day of running away,
My mind keeps coming back to him
I guess time does not heal everything
Unless time can bring him back to me

By Chloe Elizabeth

Nothing about this life is easy and all good things are the hardest to get. They are also the hardest to let go of. If you want them bad enough, you either have to let go or fight harder and I think that there is a very good chance that I will spend the rest of my life searching for him. I will walk, I will run, I will fly, I will not stop because he is the face I will always be looking for in a crowded place. Some say that all good things must come to an end, but I refuse to believe that is true. He is the best, and yes he is the only, love that I have ever had. I will not let that go easily. I will not let him go without a fight.

By Chloe Elizabeth

He told me he didn't want to fall in love with someone 423 miles away
"That's a whole lot of foot steps" he said
I can't say that I didn't feel the same way
But I couldn't help look up at the moon and pray he was looking up too
I wished for him on every shooting star I ever saw
And I watched all the sunsets thinking about his hopes and dreams
"But the truth is I really do love you a lot" he said
The truth is I really did love him with all my heart too
Not a day goes by that I don't think about being with him
I never believed in soul mates, I always believed a person could love many people
And I still think that's true
But never in the same way you love that one person, the person you're meant to be with
That person in the world that in some way, somehow, finds you
That person was him
And maybe some day we'll end up together; but that day is not today, and it's not tomorrow
But one thing I know for sure is that I'll always love him
Just like I did from the start
All those footsteps away

By Chloe Elizabeth

I know I always gave you every benefit of the doubt
I defended you through all the faults
But you should have tried a little harder
Fought a little longer
Loved me a little stronger
Because I never stopped killing myself
Trying to save the small chance we still had
And that wasn't fair
It wasn't right

By Chloe Elizabeth

I don't know how to explain it
But it feels like my heart is going to beat out of my chest
I don't have many words to describe it
But I think this is what falling in love feels like

By Chloe Elizabeth

Maybe he was right
Maybe we weren't meant to be in love
Every star in the sky and page in all of the books in my collection could never explain us
Maybe we should have fought harder for each other
Fallen to our knees and surrendered when we really had nothing more to give
Bruised and scarred from trying to hold on just a tad longer
Maybe it was our doubts that cut the rope
Perhaps it was all of our maybes that killed us in the end
We didn't believe in the 2 a.m cups of coffee or even the blood in our veins
We didn't have faith in what our future could hold, we didn't even have faith in ourselves
I think he was right when he said we couldn't do it
He was right to turn away and never come back
He saved us from more pain and maybe that's a good thing
Receiving peace in exchange for love

By Chloe Elizabeth

These moments in my life
Have taught me about love, friendship
And giving everything you have to someone
For them to lose it all along the way

By Chloe Elizabeth

You cried in my arms, a heart filled with shame
With tears in my eyes, I loved you the same

By Chloe Elizabeth

I remember looking at his eyes in a dark room
My hand was still in his when the world took a break
Spilling out the truth that has been kept inside through unbearable days
We stood still in a room full of swaying people
His eyes had never looked so beautiful than when I could see his soul
I never truly knew who he was until that moment
When he placed his heart in my hands and mine broke
To watch someone fall apart at my feet and apologize for making a mess
I picked up every piece and put him back together
With all the strength in my body I still could not handle his tears
And never have I felt truer love than when I sat on that bench
With the boy who couldn't dance
And loved him for everything he was, is and ever could be
No matter who he loved

By Chloe Elizabeth

You held him 'till your fingers bled
You meant every single word you said

You loved him 'till your heart was sore
But honey, he's not worth it anymore

Let him go

By Chloe Elizabeth

If I could, I would give you the world
she said

I would never ask you to do that
he replied

By Chloe Elizabeth

It was waste deep in a lake where I realized that if with you was where I wanted to be, then why wasn't I there? Why was I standing in the water, my family around the camp fire in the distance behind me, the moon lighting up my face, and not beside you? Why was I not with you? Sometimes, what seem like the most complicated situations in the world come to complete clarity in the strangest of circumstances. As I gently ran my fingers along the surface of the lake water, I saw a shooting star and I wished for you. I didn't wish for anything but the simple idea that me and you could some day be in the same moment together. That's all I wanted. For me, love was always an undiscovered emotion that I longed to feel. I watched the movies and listened to the songs people wrote about their love and I wanted nothing more than to find mine. But now, after tripping, stumbling and falling harder than I could have ever imagined, my love is 423.3 miles away and I'm stuck here, wishing upon stars and crossing my fingers, to be 423.3 miles away from here too.

By Chloe Elizabeth

If I lost him
My heart would miss him forever

And my soul would never stop trying
To find pieces of him in someone else

By Chloe Elizabeth

One day
I'm going to get on a plane
or get in my car
or I swear to God I will run
to you

By Chloe Elizabeth

We said forever
And we said we would try
But I felt myself slip from your fingertips
And I watched as my reflection
Became smaller and smaller in your eyes
Until they turned into the sea
And there was no trace of me left behind

By Chloe Elizabeth

I think about you a lot;
when I'm sleeping
and our memories take over my dreams

When I'm walking
and I walk past our spot
where I fell deeper into your eyes
and started to drown
and I watch that moment happen all over again

When I'm trying to hide your sweater
under my bed,
in the depths of my closet,
in the burning fire,
but I can still feel your arms around my waste

I can erase your name
from my life
but the indent will still be there,
and it will remain there,
always

And I have started to realize
that you exist
not as a figment of my imagination,
as much as I try and pretend you do

I have walked
in the imprints of your feet in the ground
and you have sat
on the counter where I always stay

And I find a comfort in the struggle
to act like you were never there
because every time
that I can feel your empty space beside me,
it brings me back to the summer
and that smile
and those eyes
and the rainy days
and the lies I called love
and it's overwhelming;
the bitter happiness

By Chloe Elizabeth

She slept in silent madness,
for the only way to reach his heart
was through her dreams

By Chloe Elizabeth

These raindrops hit the pavement
while brakes screamed
and tires spun
in the stormy weather

In a single fragment of this lifetime
a heart stopped
and the night went silent

In a single moment
all these hearts collapsed
and the floor fell from beneath their feet

As love got stronger,
days got harder
and tears flowed
like the storm on the night
that took the young boy
from our arms

These moments
and fragments
of our existence
have the ability to change everything

Sometimes love is not enough
to hold broken pieces together
and things break,
they shatter,
lives shatter

But everything ends
so it can begin again

By Chloe Elizabeth