“Perfect,
Get it perfect.”
What was ‘perfect?’
Perfect grades? Perfect manners?
Perfect charade…
Charade?
I never knew it was pretend…
Just thought fighting and lying and leaving
Was completely normal…
Felt like a broken cocoon with a beautiful butterfly
That’s too scared of the outside world to emerge.
“Perfect,
Just perfect.”
Broken chairs, broken walls, broken hearts.
Fighting wasn’t an ideal perception,
It was everything I breathed, all that I knew.
Strangling the idea of perfection
Until it slipped right through our hands.
Perfectly out of hand and sight
The only thing in sight, in fact, was a hand
Across my mother’s cheek, and only
Because she chose to speak
Well, isn’t that image just perfect?
“Perfect, Caytlin, perfect,”
The answer he gave at that moment
When asked if I believed the marriage would work
I was only eleven… eleven…
What was I supposed to say?
“No.”
Tears ran in perfect streams
Down my mother and sister’s faces
Like rain coming down softly
Calming right after the storm.
My eyes stayed dry because I knew
This was never perfection at all
Just a big misunderstanding
My mother holding onto the edge of the cliff
Because she was too afraid to let go
Of what she knew and fall into the perfect waters.
….perfect?
What is perfect?
Everything that I am not?
The things that I have failed to do?
The people I couldn’t manage to impress?
Perfect is a figment of our imaginations,
Because 'perfect' does not exist.

Tastes of metal. Tastes of rust.
I take wisps of music from the air
to try to fill up the hole.
I am not whole.
I ******* own limits,
my own blossoming self-doubt.
I am afraid of learning to hate.

I want to be the answer to somebody's question.
Is life so short that love will
evade my outstretched fingertips?
Water droplets and flowers on the ground,
and peaches.
Hugs that end too soon. Can
I ask for it to stop? Can I take
a breath?

Do you draw your own lines or
watch them form around you?
Or did you not notice them at all?

I want to be someone's wispy,
wishful thought,
drifting to touch the ground,
back in the air with the wind,
I bet it would taste like
freedom.
Having no choice.
What a paradox.

Steamy breath,
Sensual kisses, and
Trembling bodies;
Not out of fear but out of
Pure bliss
And thrusts full of nothing but
Passion
I hope you know
That with every rushed exhale
And every grin
That magically sprouts from the occasion,
My eyes are whispering
I love you