My stomach drops
And my leg shakes
As I try to remain calm.
He is sitting not 6 inches away from me.
I want to do something.
Anything.
Just to try and put out the fire of pain lit within me.
He hurt me.
I can feel the heat of his body,
And the aura spreading off of him.
His orange glow tinged with the goal of hurting me
The goal to tear me apart
And it's working.
I can feel my body unraveling
Ready to curl my hands into fists
And connect them to the softness of skin
And the crunch of a bone.
Anything.
My knuckles crying out for hit,
Not caring if they split,
They're ready.
Ready to leave a bruise wherever I hit.

How do you explain color to someone who cannot see anything because they are blind.
How do you explain the sound of a fork tapping a glass to make a toast at a wedding if they are deaf.

But how do I explain what I feel around a person I'm in love with
Because they can't hear my heart beating faster and my brain running around in overdrive even though I swear to god it sounds like a jackhammer against metal 3 feet thick
It's Unpleasant and to be frank,
Quite obnoxious in its noise.
Yet my brain and heart still does regardless of their inability to see it.

4 months in,
And I still cannot explain to myself
Why I get knots in my stomach whenever I'm about to see her?
4 months in,
And my mouth still stutters when I talk to her
Because for some unknown unexplainable reason,
I cannot seem to find myself a way to tell her how much she means to me.
There's not enough words in the dictionary
Or letters in the alphabet to even scratch the surface,
How do you explain your heart to a person who will never truly see the whole thing
Because all that's left of it
Is a broken blue crayon and a faded stick figure family my heart drew out in kindergarten?
But I’ll give it a shot.
Your love is like finding out there's a way to stop cancer,
Or finding real cheese on the moon.
Your laugh is like trying to find your way back through a forest you've never been to that you forgot to leave breadcrumbs for,
Or looking at the sun just long enough to think of what put it there
And wondering “why do I see a pink orb whenever I blink?”
Your smile
Though rare,
Is like someone coming out of a small cave sheltered by the wind inviting you in
because you're surrounded by nothing but ice.
Or a hug from a stranger on the street who was in need of some love to make the tears find their way back into the place where they came,
Your bag covered in pins
is like you've gone many places but always found your way back
And finally met me.
Your voice
Is like I found a song I didn't know existed
But lit up a city in me so long abandoned I thought was just rubble by now
Or a sound Id searched my whole life for had finally found me.
Being around you,
Is like I'm sky diving but there won't be any ground, so I'm sky diving forever.
At first scary and I scream at the top of my lungs afraid of a ground suddenly appearing
Much too close for my liking.
Eventually calm and feel able to see what it's like to fly regardless that I lack wings.
Knowing you love me,
Is like the feeling you get when you don't understand a foreign language and have no idea what to do,
Or laying on a hill during summer
Trying to make shapes in the clouds
And a blue sky that never seems to fade.
Finding you,
Was like when they found the titanic that they looked for decades after it sank,
Or going about your day and bumping into your own hope that decides to then stay with you.
You're like the princess I call you,
And snap back wearing badass that calls me short despite my average height
Because you're taller.
You're like a prayer I never thought would get answered,
Because I don't believe in God
And the girl who wants me to sit in her lap
Despite my crushing weight,
You pretend it doesn't make your legs hurt.
You're like the person that I've always wanted to meet,
But never got a chance to,
And a beautiful girlfriend
Who somehow puts up with my tea drinking yoga studio personality
Even though it's completely the opposite of your coffee drinking crime show watching life.
You're like a mystery I can't analyze because your walls only let out slips of emotion
Just to remind me that they exist,
And a smile that doesn't need super glue to be attached to my face
Because it's not for show
But for happiness instead.
You're like a dance
That I've never wanted to learn but now do despite my hatred for dance,
Or an ability to finally make me speak in front of a crowd without running off stage or incoherently stuttering so much it isn't a language any more and yet a series of pauses,
sheepish smiles,
and a repeated letter in the alphabet that can't seem to make its way through the word.
You're like a poem I'm writing
I don't have to think about it.
It's a part of me,
Not a pushed idea to form.

You're like the girl I'm dating.
One day you’ll meet her,
But just like explaining color to a blind man,
You cannot describe something someone cannot see.
They need to see it for themselves.

Given a million chances
To make you feel like I do.
Not one of those chances
Would I even try.
I would think about it.
Think about the way you made me feel.
Think about how karma is a *****,
But remember
That it would come back to you.
To you.
The girl who took everything inside me,
Threw it to the ground,
And buried it in shards of glass.
You were my best friend.
My big sister,
My role model.
I followed your every move,
Like a dance I was still trying to learn.
You had it all sorted out.
You were clean.
Drug free and ready to take the world by storm.
I love you.
Partner in crime,
And partner in life.
When you wanted to fall,
I was there to help you stand
Like a crutch bringing you back from the place that called your name.
You did the same for me.
All those times we walked around the town and laughed like we were crazy.
Granted,
We are.
Hell,
That's how we met.
We found ourselves being crazy together.
Thing one and thing 2,
We were the craziest team the world could dream up.
We drove halfway across the state,
To get mediocre ice cream.
We played music so loud our ears were ringing with the bass long after it had been turned off.
And we laughed.
We snuck out, like typical teens
We ran around the beach at night skinny dipping and making a racket.
Keep all those old people awake, and yelling at us.
Us.
We were the stars of our personal little talk show.
We ruled everything we ever touched.
The queens of the castle we called the world,
We were unstoppable.
Until one day,
We were.
Those loud
Crazy nights
Turned into cricketed silence.
I reached out.
Multiple multiple times,
I reached out.
Waiting for you to grab my hand out of wherever you were hiding,
I held my hand out
Waiting for your familiar finger tips to slap my palm and say “table tennis!”
We were everything.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
But one day,
After our final parade,
We fought.
We fought because you blamed me,
For something I didn't know had happened.
You told me,
You hated me.
That I was a child
For believing that friendship meant forever.
You called a *****
Because one night you got us to drink on the beach.
You got me to drink.
A road I should have refused to go down,
You whispered words to help me join you.
The night to end all nights.
You called me a liar,
After you stole my parents liquor and made it my fault.
You called me worthless.
Knowing where we came from,
You called me worthless.
You let him threaten to **** me,
That he was joking.
And I believed you.
Until he wasn't.

You look just like the girl I met 3 years ago.
You look just like the girl I lost 7 months ago.

But did I lose her
Or did she lose me,
Or did we both lose each other?

Can you lose something that was never really yours?
Something you thought you had
But really didn't?
Can you lose something
That was never there?
Can you lose a girl with rainbow hair?

Because 3 years ago
I met a girl
Who did not have rainbow hair.
But was a gay cliche,
Back then her hair was red.
Her hair was red and long,
Kept in place by a braid and a bandana.
And she made all the little kids laugh.

3 years ago I met a girl with hair the color of a blue that had started to fade,
And left a trail of sickly green dye behind.
Back then she had friends
And spent most of her days laughing until her core was sore the next day.

2 years ago
I met a girl
Who still dyed her hair with splat
But was now blue and purple.
Short
Half shaved
Blue and purple
To match her personality.

2 years ago I met a girl
Whose hair had been bleached
enough times that it felt like straw at the bottom.
Her hair was a red that made fire trucks look dull
And hurt to look at in the sun.
She held half smiles instead of her usual dimple faced grin.

Last year I met a girl
Hair just like the last
But more purple
Less blue.
Her body looked like a clean canvas without stripes.
The purple in her hair burst with paint
Creating whatever flowed down her pen.
Scratching dragons, tigers, and penguins,
The ink in her hair
translates onto the page,
And there was no way to describe it.

Last year I met a girl
Who spent her life in hospitals and trying to stay alive.
Her hair had become lonely without its color.
It was her natural black and bleached clashing in war.
Her ink on the page was words instead of sketches.

This year I met a girl.
This time I didn't know her.
All I knew was the rainbow hair
Cut off on one side,
And flowing to her cheek bone on the other.
She wore a black suit
White shirt,
And that shiny yellow tie she had always loved.
She loves ties.
Just like the girl I met 3 years ago,
This new girl loved ties.
She had a track record of bad mistakes
That matched up perfectly with mine.
This year I met a girl.
I had no clue who she was,
But she looked familiar all the same.
This new girl resembled the first.
She laughed often,
Smiled so big that her face hurt at the end of the day.
This new girl didn't live in hospitals.
She watched horror movies and tried to skateboard.
An unsuccessful plan.

And I realized.
These girls with colored hair and paints
are all similar.
They have the same goofy grin,
And a wrinkled up nose when they laugh.
They all have the same scar where their pet iguana accidentally scratched them.
They have infectious laughter that makes you turn your head to look back and see what it was.
They all have the same pale skin
That I've always teased about.
All of those girls,
Hated skirts
And wore cargo shorts or skinny jeans
With no in between
Those girls would not be caught dead in a dress
And only wore suits.
Only edgy punk rock clothes
Without listening to the bands
And instead listened to Florence.
All of those girls had the same name
And they all had the same personality.
The girls were identical in soul.
Those girls were one person.
Those girls were my first love.

And I realized,
These girls all have the same ****** structure
And the same choice in music, clothes, and morals.
All of those girls had the same undeniable light
With a spirit that wanted to touch everything.

Today I met a girl.
I met a girl who smiled as she wrote this,
And didn't feel an aching when she wrote about her first love.

Today I met myself.

We went down in history.
Best worst couple alive.
We deserved an award.
Tiger striped pajamas
And a SLIGHTY
Illegal pengin drawn on the side of a building.
Made by a painter
More worthy than van gough.
Goodbye.
And I say that with no hatred.
Goodbye.
We had a good run.
As you said,
You and I,
Were never meant to be.
What was it?
5 times?
7?
To be honest I’d lost count.
So goodbye.
Im not washing all those campfire songs and broken bucket memories
down the drain.
I’m simply storing them in a box that has your name.
A box vacumed air tight,
So that I can never need another band-aid
With a green crayon on it.
That box will be sealed,
But only opened in short filtered bursts
Just to remind myself,
You were here.
To remind myself of a first kiss,
A first wish,
And somehow we ended up watching the avengers?
Don't ask me,
Because I was too busy looking at you,
To take even a second watching the movie.
Which you were fine with,
Because you hated
Superheroes.
Which Ill never understand,
Because your sister and brother
Look at you,
Seeing nothing but a driven
Well thought out
Superhero.
For a while there,
You were my superhero too.
You managed to get me out of a tree,
Which I have now learned,
Are not to climbed
When you have a fear of heights.
Im not sure how,
But even in the middle of the night
With a blood moon clouding most of the light,
And a bunch of your friends talking about the latest gossip
You got me down from a tree
That I had decided to climb,
Just to see see the moon better.
I had climbed
To where the branches swayed in the wind
And to where tall girls with 110 pounds on their body
Were definitely,
Not designed to be.
Once down,
After what seemed like hours of agony,
It was probably about 3 minutes.
I was scared shitless.
But when everyone left,
We stayed in the grass,
Trying to make our own constelations.
Out of barely visible stars
Shodowed by a red tint,
That drove out every speck of light other than its own.
Thats kind of what you were like.
You drove the life out out of me,
And created a new one.
You locked up who I was in a cage
With the key having been thrown into the nile,
I called it love.
Because you were trying to make me better than I was before.
Someone who fit your lifestyle.
You turned me into a broken record
With so many scratches,
The glossy look of the tracks were barely visible.
But you werent all bad.
You kissed me at a campfire,
Walking back to evening circle
Where we would sing some weird song
About the sun being gone,
And the day being done?
Then we all went to our cabins,
But I was frozen in place.
Because theres no way that was real.
It wouldve meant that my wish,
The way you told me to wish,
Actually worked.
One of my friends had to take my arm and drag me in my daze back to the cabin.

You took me to a golf course
just past the woods,
Because you thought it was closed.
It was not closed.
We learned this when a golfball missed my head by less than an inch,
It was an honest mistake,
But we laughed.
Partily because of the golf ball,
Mainly,
Because that was our luck.
Our luck was having a ball miss my head by an inch,
And a golf course that lacked green grass,
was still open.
Our luck was getting lost,
Because I got distracted by the wildflowers in the woods,
And walked off to make a bouqet for you.
We werent lost,
We were just,
Taking the scenic route I guess.
But we wound back up at the baseball field with built in playground off to the side
just as light decided to dip from view,
And leave the very sliver of a moon
To try and keep us able to see.
That was our luck.
But you had bad luck
And so did I.
We seemed to circle in hurricanes.
A world being thrown about until that quiet little eye.
Before we were thrown back into misfortune,
We were addictive.
When my bad luck met yours,
It was the kind of darkness no one longs for.
This was not the darkness of sleep
Where you could go and be alone.
This darkness was not that.
Our darkness was a silent room that screamed loudly
Hoping to deafen us through our separate walls,
Our darkness was a room that had no doors,
No floors,
And lacked a ceiling.
But there was still no way out. Barbed wire
Higher than our Mount Everest of past,
And even your ego couldn't climb on top of mine to get half way up.
So we sat in opposite corners of our big and screaming rooms,
And waited for the whisper to turn it all off.
My whisper.
My whisper was apologizing and making promises you wouldn't never give me the chance to keep.
Your whisper back
Was an army of paper airplanes with one message.
I forgive you.
For every apology I said
And for every piece of my heart I cut out as a peace offering,
You gave me a paper airplane.
Each with the same intent.
The intent to make the point stab into my skin,
And bleed more poison into my blood,
Without me noticing the scratch.
You distracted me by sitting on a now broken bucket,
And by laughing when I made a joke we both knew wasn't funny.
You distracted me by laying in the grass
Or putting your head in my lap.
And I distracted myself by playing with your changing colored hair,
While pretending this was real.
I wanted it to be real.
For me it was.
It wasn't for you.

But sometimes our difficult rooms separated
And though our rooms no longer screamed at each other
The rooms screamed at occupant of it.
Mine screamed at me,
And your didn't scream but was silent and let you sit with your pain.
My room couldn't do that.
My room tore me apart,
Because all of the shredded pieces would eventually go to you.
And suddenly,
Our rooms connected and a paper plane flew my way.
I let it hit my right cheekbone.
I opended my paper expecting your usual note.

But it was different.
This time your note said no.
I hadn't whispered yet.
But “no” still landed in my lap.
My whisper back was one of confusion.
Another one of the paper airplanes hit my heart,
But the paper was worn out and red.
It wrote,
Not safe for you.

And again I whispered,
This time a pained confusion,
I asked what your paper airplane meant.
This time your paper airplane said:
I'm sorry.
And then,
All of the paper airplanes caught a small fire from their edges and then they were gone.
Even the ashes,
Gone.