I would laugh and brush it off.
It was a common question,
One that was asked too frequently.
"Where's your motHer? How is she?"

I always replied with something vague.
"She's been away for a while."
Or
"My mother? She's been sick so I haven't seen much of her."

Really, though,
She's at home wishing she could hurt me.
I know, I know,
She's my mother.
Mothers aren't supposed to do that, right?
You sEe,
My mother thought love came in bundLes of fist fights,
Of crying,
Of cuts and bruises.
I know she was raised that way, I know.

What I can't seem to understand, though,
Is that she passes this "love" down.
It makes me sad.
I wish she knew how much it hurt to see my mother in Pain,
But it also hurts to see a stranger behind drunken eyes lay her hands upon the child that made her into what she is now.

I hate her.
But she is my mother,
Right?

I was a mess, or, I still am.
But you loved that.
You loved the way my lips tasted like honey,
The way the sun kissed my tan skin.
I breathed summer air as if I was made of it and,
Well,
You fell in love.
I couldn't blame you,
I felt like a dream.
That was what I was, though.
When the sun set,
My skin no longer glowed,
My lips cracked,
The air in my lungs was cigarette smoke.
When the sun rose,
My hair shined,
My smile was bright,
My eyes were a brown-eyed honey pool.
As if the night didn't consume me,
The scars buried in my flesh were taken by the sun,
Returning me to grace the surface as a false advertisement of health,
Happiness,
Warmth.
I held the sun in my hands once,
Even during the night,
Until it was taken away from me.
The sun pulls my strings until I cannot dance any longer,
For the moon catches me in her gentle light,
Allowing me to bask in the unreachable moments of the day.

It was terrible, what she did.

She caressed my cheek with hands not so kind,
She grabbed my wrists with a grip too tight,
Her fingers left light little bruises across my throat,
And I called her my mother.

The woman before me screamed obscenities.

"I hate you."
                      
                        "You're nothing."

"You're not the daughter I wanted"

I called this person my mother.
She gave life to me after all,
I should be grateful.

Even if the bruises take a while to go away.
Sometimes the cigarette burns scar.
The cuts and fractures never completely heal.

I call this my mother.
                         Sometimes, it's terrible what she does.

"Dear God, what happened to you?"

I couldn't look at him.

I couldn't look at him with sad eyes with what was left of my broken heart pouring out of my chest. I hugged myself and kept looking at the ground as the tears fell.

"I fell in love with you. As stupid and as simple as it sounds, It's more complicated and intense than you will ever know. I didn't just fall in love with your laugh or the way you looked at me. It was the passion and drive you had for the future you wanted, the meaning behind every song you showed me, the life behind the eyes of someone who breathed fire into my lungs for the things I loved most; you. That is what happened to me."

It was your hand gripped onto the back of my neck.
You pulled down onto my body and I ached for more.
Your hips were grinding against me.
The music in the background faded and the windows fogged.

"No more disappearing," I breathed heavily.

You said, "I won't."

We collided in heavy need and our lips crashed as if the waves of our beach was caught in a storm that had been long overdue.
Our clothes pulled off our bodies and the heat between us steamed.

After that,
It was a blur.
We melted in each others embrace not so lovingly.
Somewhere in that moment,
You asked me,
"What do you want?"

I said, "Something I can't have."

And in that moment,
We realized just how human we were.

Elusive thoughts and dreams,
Permeant to the mind.
Merely phasing through the realities of my soul.
I loved the sickness of the mind,
A dark murky cloud of an unpredictable storm.
Pushing through the phases of that empty vastness,
Drowning in a swirling mix of confusion,
Spreading like a poison throughout the veins of a twisting,
Winding,
Painful injection upon the skin.
Living through the soreness of a long familiar ache,
Yearning for a peace that never quite settled.

It was the flash of colors,
Your eyes covered in the hair you hated so much.
Reds,
Blues,
Oranges,
Pinks.
Colors mushed together to find what made your heart beat out of your chest.
Blurry,
Blurry pictures of you.
Like you were always out of reach to me.

He asked her this one question.

She, beside him, curled up in her small frame. Knees tucked to her chest, pink lips, and coffee stained teeth, she smiled small.

"I've been asked this question by many," she says, "And I've always said things like someone's voice, or the way they held me. Maybe it was their laugh or the way my heart ached when I smelled their t-shirts at night.
You, though, will always leave me with an unanswered question.
I don't know why I love you but for some reason, my heart will whisper your name when I'm too intimate with a bottle pressed to my lips.
When the tears I cry are warm from the sound of your voice when it pours through the videos we've laughed in.
I don't think I love you but my heart does. Maybe that's why my mind cannot think of any reasons because you lie in my chest where it aches the most."

The past is a rundown motel that hasn’t had any visitors in a while but yet you try and stay.
You know the walls are molding and the ceiling has long since caved in but here you are
Residing in a bed with the springs pricking all over your body,
Numbing you to reality.
You cling on to when the room smelled of fresh paint and it wasn’t so dark.
In fact, you can even almost see the sun peeking through the window as if it was yesterday.
But yesterday,
Was many years ago.
The rust,
The damp air,
The rot,
It takes over Yesterday.
Overgrown weeds and musk cover the floor,
Yet,
You still walk barefoot as if it was the carpet that was once there.
You checked in to this marvelous moment not even thinking it could turn into a place.
A place that you began to frequently visit even if the people that lived with you there have no longer occupied the space since,
Well,
Yesterday, it seems.
You sink lower into those springs,
Unaware of your broken bones and puncture wounds because you decided to live in that moment,
Instead of walking out the door at the first sign of flickering lights.
When you knew,
Deep down,
Staying wasn’t an option,
But revisiting became a habit.
Only if it was Yesterday.

Listen to me,
My love,
listen to me.
The urgent call of your name rings through the air,
Like a warning bell being sound off.
Loathe the way you wash over my body,
Consuming the dark corners of self indulgence,
As if you know the culling sways my every move.
If you knew the damage,
The turmoil,
The rot in my brain,
That spreads the more I touch you,
The more I breathe you in,
Poison in the warning bells.
I sink lower into these depths,
How I will rise,
I do not know.
But it begins with engaging with my pain
As motive.
I begin here,
Forfeiting my life to the self indulgence I've denied myself.

Running was never new to me.
Different places,
Different people,
Unfamiliar smells and unfamiliar buildings.
When things became too familiar,
Recognizing street signs,
Familiar names,
Memories and places etched into the back of my mind,
I move again.
Pain is an ever accompanying acquaintance,
A travel partner that never fails to remind me that I am,
In fact,
Always running from something.

I wonder if the mothers of the
     Boys we fall in love with
           Know that they are the
                  Monsters we fear that
                         Lurk in the dark.
                                                           ­                       I wonder if the boys we
                                                                ­              Fall in love with know
                                                                ­      That we break and fall
                                                            ­ Apart within their grasp
                                               When they say, "I love you."
I wonder if they can
     Hear us scream their names
            When we have the nightmares
                       About their beautiful voices
                                Echoing through the night.

                                                               ­                     I wonder if they know
                                                            ­              The pain that they cause
                                                           ­  Within the bodies of future
                                       Mothers who warn their daughters
                             About the men who've hurt them.

                      
                                          
                     ­                       All I do is wonder.

He became a reason of many.
A reason to laugh,
A reason to love,
A reason to be.
With every doubt I ever had,
It was like a cold wash of rain,
Wiping away any negativity that creeped upon me.
There was a wholeness about him,
The calm in the word safety,
A steadiness in the way he talks,
It became an overspill of excitement,
Much like the tide on a sunny day.
He reminded me of cold drives with all of the windows down,
The sound of an acoustic guitar when being plucked,
Drunken laughs and soft whispers of delicate words shared between breathless kisses,
Quiet hums in the still of an empty house.
He became my reason,
He became my home.

He wore a wolfs skin,
a thick hide of coarse fur.
He hid in the forest and only came out at night,
Stalking amongst his prey.
I saw him at the woods line,
Eyes glimmering like the blue green sky in the midst of a new moon.
The air around him clouded,
The cold silent wind rushing in the space between us.
The still of the night softly whispered to us.
My heart thudded,
My lungs were like bricks under the light of the pale moon sky,
My eyes fixated on his.
My wolf,
My spirit,
The churning howl deep in my belly.

I never was a believer,
One that promised me my faith anyways.
It wasn't until I laid with you,
Felt you between the crevasse of my legs,
Your soft hands pull and tug at my skin,
The way your hot breath rolled over my lower stomach.
And I ached.
I ached for the warmth you brought me beneath my bed sheets,
The fire in my belly whenever I heard my name roll softly off your tongue,
The tremble in my legs when I thought about you.
Your gaze forever entangling me within my own mind,
Curious to lie with the sin of lust once more,
Tantalizing with the sweet smell of you.

Have you ever fallen in love at first sight?
I didn’t believe it could happen,
And then I met you.
You have no interest in keeping me,
I have every intention of loving you.
You weave in and out of life,
Unpredictable,
Unknowing of where you’re going to show up next.
Your smell is intoxicating,
Lingering in the air around me,
Falling asleep next to you with your back towards me.
I’ve tasted you on my lips,
I’ve felt you settle into the bones of my life and yet,
You are so fickle.
I know you are not good for me,
I know you aren’t reliable,
But *******.
Why do I feel like I need you like I need air?

It’s not them that tears you apart,
It’s the hurt.
There’s rawness in the face of pain,
The type of raw that comes only in waves of pure agony,
Blissfully beautiful after a time of healing.
The type of pain that boils the blood like hot lava,
When it travels through your veins at the sound of another’s name roll off of their tongue,
A picture that didn’t involve you,
A song you can only hear the words,
“I don’t want this anymore,”
Echo through your broken mind.
Our favorite place was no longer filled with the scent of happiness,
But the scent of you.
You linger in the walls that watched our love develop,
The windows that saw the fights that happened,
The doors that slammed shut to separate ourselves from one another to breathe.
Even the air betrays me when I walk through the street,
Always smelling the sweet scent of home.
You are home to me.

I still find you in the faces of strangers,
People pass by with no hesitation,
But I stop.
I analyze the way their nose might be shaped or the way your voice carried throughout the crowd like you were there,
With me,
Around me.
I drank the ***** to drown you,
I chased it with burning coffee to ease the burn knowing it would make it worse.
I can’t see the beauty in me without you,
I can’t feel my heart without you.
To be honest,
I’m going mad.
Insane, even.
Without you.
I miss you.
I love you.
I don’t want to keep comparing other people to you,
To see parts of you.
I want you.
Only you.

We fell in love slowly,
Not at once.
It was never like the movies where we touched hands and softly gasped,
Never a look from across the room,
We didn’t have a magical moment.
We grew together like the leaves reach for the sun,
We gravitated together like magnets with a light pull.
We danced in empty kitchens,
Sleepily grabbing each other in cold nights,
Sharing the oxygen in the space we occupied together in white sheets.
You made me learn how to love my bed again,
Feel safe in an area I wasn’t made comfortable with,
I found myself feeling okay.

It’s 2 a.m. and you sleep peacefully.
While you dream I stay awake.
I stay in the still of the night watching,
Listening.
I see the demons that walk during the night,
The fleeting glimpses of the tall man,
The one on stilts with the fedora,
The hanging lady by the tree.
I hear their whispers in the soft wind that blows,
Goose bumps trailing my skin with the presence of them all around me.
It is a warm night yet I feel cold.
A sniffle here,
A giggle there,
Voices in the back of my mind.
Am I hallucinating?
Am I crazy?

Moon-lit slits through ivory curtains,
Windows kept ajar for creeping secrets,
The sound of humming busy bugs.
Beds kept warm through unconscious bodies,
This was what summer was about.
Silly whispers of unkempt persons,
Clothes of disarray,
Tangled limbs and kisses of good mornings,
Time seemingly kept at bay.
Memories never made so none were lost,
Places never visited so never seen,
People of uncharted territory so they were never missed.
Fingers roaming unwanted strangers in the dark,
More silly whispers about a forgotten tomorrow,
No more good morning kisses of today.

A story isn’t a story without the beginning.
A beginning that told us from the start that there was an end,
An end so near that we were not ready.
I was afraid of the cliffhanger that approached quicker than a rolling thunderstorm,
A storm that looked only of dark skies with hopes of a drizzle,
Not a flood.
Our passion died like the fire within that storm,
The drizzle that turned from a downpour into a flood warning into a whirling tornado of unhappiness.
My dear, I wish I could say we were the storm but I was the rain and you were the fire but the thing was,
You saw me coming.
You saw the storm and the rain yet you lit yourself upon a dry Sahara of promises and the secret I do’s we whispered to each other during the night.
That dry, crackled earth turned soft and squishy from the waves of turmoil that rained down onto the surface,
The fire doused with remorse over a lost lover.
You weren’t dead,
You just left without saying goodbye.
The ****** was nothing of a ****** but a steady decline of I love you’s to, “Have a good life,”
To barely talking,
To trailing down a hill to the very end of our story,
Regret.
I regret everything but you, my darling.
The damp earth will grow again and while I may remember the dry Sahara,
I will grow a rainforest of color without you in it.

I watched the world spin from the windshield of this old car.
I felt the slip of the bald tires,
My hands tighten around the wheel,
And I screamed.
I screamed but somewhere in all of that mess,
That chaos,
I knew I was going to be okay.
I knew I was going to live,
Despite totaling my car.