“…wait, are you afraid of the dark?” he asked with a tone of disbelief.
“So what if I am?”
“Well, I'd say that's a shame. You allow your imagination to control you.”
She couldn’t disagree. He was right and she was embarrassed.
“turn off the light,”
silence.
"and just listen to my voice."
And she did.

"how strange it is to be anything
at all"

sometimes i look
at my skin
and wonder why we have
branches growing out of lined palms,
and wonder why
our eyeballs look like galaxies
compacted

and i realize that there is no answer
but to stop thinking about it
and just
live
for ***** sake.

i feel

naked

but vulnerably so;

i don't want to let you in,
show you the deepest crevices of my soul
not for fear of embarrassment,

i'm just not going to let you break me in half
like that.

"leave before getting left,"

a motto for girls like me.
                                                             you don't know the frustration
                                                           when things don't go as planned.
stop saying
                  g
                    o
                      o
                        d
                          night.

please take me into the
forest, deep
with tall redwoods and let me feel the rocks like
swords under my callous feet.
where we can watch the sunset from
up above the tilting world, sitting on our thrones
made of Marlboro filters and sticks
on a mountain cliff.
we'd be cliffhangers
and thieves and vagabonds, painting ourselves
with the blue tinted night
like the deepest parts of
the
sea
far from the wandering grasp of
reality.
watch the stars with eyes like
flickering lightbulbs,
shining yellow in empty, echoing rooms.
bring along four bottles
of wine,
one for each of us.

we'll drink until theres wine slipping past our cheeks
like some kind of blood-orange sob,
leaking out our hollowed belly-buttons
rivers running swift through the lines of our
palms.
wounded from every pore with the blood of
our intoxication;
magenta tongue stained skin.

would you let me take your hand and lead you
through the empty, knocking dark
and sing to you in the soft moments of
before morning?
would you trust me enough to
close your eyes
and let me lead you in a bruised,
tumbling
drunken journey to the top of the
highest mountain?
we could lay in the summer blanketed wind
made of dancing sky and
burning earth.
close our eyes and stop the earthquake in
our minds,
wake up with the sunshine seeping through
every corner of our aching
bodies,
roses growing out of our jigsaw jaws and puzzle piece
crumbling ribs and lungs;
see through our sober fingers and
wandering eyes
a different world than it was at
midnight.

When I pushed my food away and got up to leave the table,
My mother took one glance at me and said,
"It's not healthy, what you're doing." And she continued eating.
Guilt was all I could feel, but I just couldn't eat last night,
Not without the food coming back up.
Just like how I still can't play that song,
Not without memories of him coming back.