this is an open letter to anyone who has the audacity to try and love you like i did.

dear whateverthefuckyournameis,

i apologize in advance for spilling my boiled blood on the hem of your skirt. what you need to understand, is that you are standing on ground previously reserved for my feet, so forgive me for any bitterness that seeps through the cracks in my clenched fists. i don't hate you, but i can't be your friend. you probably don't know about me, and if you do, let me commend your bravery. i have a tendency to set my problems on fire, and in my bouts of anger everything looks flammable, especially girls with paper complexions. i'm sorry. i have never been one to walk away, so i don't know how to explain to you the holes in the bottoms of my shoes. but i have been further than you will ever go. this is not supposed to be an angry letter, but lately that's the only thing coming out of me. i don't even know your name but the thought of your hands reaching for him makes we want to break them. i will douse your dreams in gasoline and strike the match against your cheek. but i know that's not right, see, the poison crawling out from the end of my pen belongs to a scarier version of myself i try not to know. my heartache is an insatiable war cry in the dead of night, that will stop at nothing to shatter all your windows. it shames me to admit that i've found a sort of twisted satisfaction in using passive aggression to breach your armor. i am sick with missing a set of arms i was not privileged enough to know. i speak with all the grace of an atom bomb and wonder about the rubble at my feet. you are white picket fence and i am barbed wire. some girls are lions, some are lambs, and i learned to love, teeth bared and snarling. one of the only things that keeps me going is the hope that one day i'll learn how to love something without making it bleed. i may have never been his, but for a time he was mine, so please understand why i taste acid when i think about your mouth on his. again, i am sorry. i know it is not my place to be so full of resentment, but there is a part of me that sincerely hopes it bothers you to know he dreamt of me before you were even a thought. there is a side of me that thrives on the image of the color being drained from your face when you read this. but i am trying to learn how to be softer. this letter is the manifestation of a self-inflicted war that has been raging in my chest since he first told me about you. you will try to be good to him, and you might even succeed. if you ever find yourself singing him to sleep, like i did, don't ask if he wants to hear another song, just keep going until his breathing slows.

- m.f.

I wish I could say
it's not you anymore but
truth is I still miss you like hell
and I can't stop the way your name
rolls off of my tongue so perfectly
and familiarly because
you are all that I know
you are the smell of home
when I am lost and all alone
and it will always be you
*it will always be you

I'm sitting at the edge of every minute you thought should've been your last, thinking.
Thinking about how different things should be verses what they currently are.
What if my fingertips weren't built like the tips of matches?
My hands would be more skin than third degree burns or the look of a kitchen ceiling after a mother's cry for help after burning down the whole kitchen trying to put a meal in front of her children,
with an empty bottle of whiskey in her left hand.
If this is how it needs to be so that you can cope,
you can burn my insides like you're trying to get the attention of a rescue helicopter,
but don't think for a second you can use me to warm up your hands while we wait, don't you dare.
You can treat me like a war zone but you will not shed a single tear over any bloodshed pouring through my territory.
None of this should've happened.
The only tone you'd ever taught your voice was to let your tongue hit the back of your teeth
the same way rain hits the inner workings of a chestnut piano,
you set it in a storm and 'rhythm' loses its meaning.
You've been taking piano lessons since you were six,
your voice shouldn't sound this way.
Maybe if I had learned to let go the correct way,
If I knew there was a correct way.
Either you let go of something and watch it hit the pavement and try to keep the feeling away from your heart,
or you let it slip right from your fingers which doesn't work out well when your fingertips are made of matches and your veins are storing gasoline.

It's been raining for months and I can't turn the faucet off – which reminds me: the sea is yours if you want it, and you don't have to be afraid of a little rainwater anymore. When you walk to your car with your shoes off and most of your sanity folded in your jeans, when your feet slap against puddles and you are remembering that you left your jacket on the doorknob, don't ever wonder if I will awaken suddenly, crying because you never stayed long enough for me to write that song to the beat of your hesitant pulse. Your car, evidently can take you farther than my hands can, but no road leading to your house and no street lamp mocking you silently knows that I hang pearls on the threads of your sanity and my stairs groan loudest when you are trying to leave quietly. If you turn around now – if you run back and tell me that you want to be sky to me and nothing else, then I will let you, as long as you promise to bleed the next eighty thousand sunrises; I will stop mentioning you to forests and looking for you in satellites and in smoldering coals, if you promise to murmur my name when the horizon is stretching and prostrating itself across the late evening. I will tell you where the sun goes when the Atlantic swallows her whole, if you tell me about the streams of cirrus clouds backing up your bloodstream. And I never ask you to search for the wildfires under my shirt again, if you give me all of the starlight under yours.

Choices are demanding.
They either benefit both parties, either one, or neither.  A constant give and take, a prosperous economy.  Never yielding, never waiting, ever lurking, ever close.
You can't control the choices you will have to make, nor can you control the outcome.  You cannot choose your consequence, and you cannot choose your reward.
It is either meant to be, or it isn't.  It is predestined.  This was written.
You are doomed with the certainty of fate.

I feel him through my bones like the way the whiskey made me feel okay again

slowly, then all at once.


I could see his hands on the ******* of another woman and his eyes wanting her like the way I cried and yelled his name alone on my bed

passionately, and undiluted


I saw his face smiling at my stories and jokes like the way the words "I love you" fell out of his mouth

forced, and heartbreakingly austere


I stopped crying over him like the way I finished the painting on my easel

I never did.