So many thoughts, even beautiful ones
lost over the day.
They'll come and I'll smile and think
"I should write that down."
But I never do.
Maybe it's poetic.

I’m doing fine without you.
Everyone said it and everyone was so sure
and everyone was right because
I can go whole hours and days without thinking of you. I never thought I would be able to do that.
I’m doing fine without you,
and I hope you’re fine, too.
I’d say sorry but neither of us are. I’d say I miss you but I don’t.
You’d say you hate me but you probably don’t care enough anymore.
Hate is exhausting, I know.
I’m doing fine without you.
It’ll be a year in July since I found someone better.
And it’ll be two in August since we ruined everything.
Bout five since I didn’t know who you were,
so about five since I was happiest.
But I’m happy again.
I’m doing fine without you.

She's got a bit of understanding of me in her pocket, though she's never treated me like Margo Roth Spiegelman or Alaska Young, but I so appreciate that she knows I am not ordinary either. She won't ever know the ways that I love her for loving me when I fall short. Over time, maybe I can make her understand that I spent three years being treated like a normal girl, my broken shards swept aside and the rest of myself glossed over with a simple layer of facade and denial, and I embraced it, and it took something from me quite incredibly devastating. I spent my growing up years being treated like there was no hope for me. But she loves my heart, knowing all it's debilitating flaws. Though I was once some terrible, selfish child, she loved me through it. I am miraculously confident that even one day when she comes to know how much strength it took to learn to speak on the phone without wanting to cry, and that I still have a lot of trouble looking other humans in the eye, and almost every day, I smoke cigarettes and listen to loud music until I give myself headaches, and I just really don't care... I believe she will still love me. She doesn't see me as weak as I see myself. I hope she knows I call her angel because looking back now, I know she's saved me a hundred times over. While I'm not quite sure yet how to exist in a love like this, the way love should have always been, I am eternally grateful.

It took me a long time to love myself, and now I realize, I thank all the higher powers, I thank myself, and I thank those who helped ***** me up along the way, because my ocean-deep scattered head and my stitched scar-tissue heart are my two most prized possessions, and I've just about fallen in love with the way my heart breaks over and over and keeps beating

do you understand that i have loved you above all else in this world? at times, i have placed you all too high over my own head.
there are songs i swear you wrote for me
there was blood
there were tears and ***** shot glasses
there will be nights i have to go without you
when i still need you
need is an overused word.

might be the most honest thing i have ever said when i come to admit
i have never tried this hard for anything

I'm too tired to consider this good work
My message is simple and then I'll drift off

-I will not feel bad
-I do not deserve to feel bad
-we all make choices, I can live with mine
-it is not my fault, it is exactly the opposite
-I am doing the best I can
-I will be okay

You were there. How am I supposed to act like I have no one to talk to about this... thing.. when you were there? You went through it, too. Is it killing you, too? I buried it but I guess not deep enough. It has been fighting me because it doesn't want to stay in - it wants to scream, it wants to cry. It wants to cry for days. But if I let myself cry I'm not sure I would stop before we drowned.
I think I might miss you. And I decided if you call again, I won't hang up this time. I thought for a moment you might see this and call, but then I remember it's the only thing you know nothing of. You can't see these words.
I think I might wish you did.

on a day that seems designed to make my arms feel a little emptier than all the rest
on a day i am supposed to celebrate those i am most envious of
on a day when i face my biggest challenge of being kind and selfless, i think i fail
because today i can't sacrifice my feelings to rise above, it hurts too much



Happy Mother's Day, 2019

what happens when you don't
"figure it out"?
what if you don't
"get over it"?
what do you do when you can't be okay?
what happens when you don't know
where you're going? when
where you've been
won't leave you alone?

*5.6.13

Leaving cigarette ashes all up and down I-40 for nearly 900 miles. I just got done breathing you in enough to last me for 31 days and all I want is to go back to sleep in the curve of your body. I can't help but feel this drive would go much faster if you were in the seat to my right, but I'll keep barreling down this road, alone, headed home, but I'm not sure I can call it that it that, because no one there understands that I didn't take my heart with me when I pulled out of the hotel parking lot, and I'll never know the right words to explain why  I am so low when I return with the smell of your embrace still on my clothes, and I can still feel your flesh burning fresh in my mind. And I know that my mother is worried about my heart but I can't figure out how to make her realize that this is different, this is it, you're it, you're mine, you are my future. And I know better than anyone that you were always meant for me. Distance is not for the untrue love. The truth is, angel, I am feeling again and that is because of you. I feel every moment I am not next to you and, oh God, how I feel every second in your arms. Darling, I want you to know how much I hate the space between us. At least as I head back to Carolina, I know I'll be searching for a place we can hide away together. I can feel the miles growing and hurting but I also know that we can be strong through them and through the time we're missing. You are my whole heart, you are my girl, my world, forever.

sit down, i could show you the slivers of skin replaced with scar tissue. i bet you'd think i was pretty ****** if i were to say that tonight i want to cut just to cut. i am not sobbing, shaking or sinking. in lieu of you, i want that blade.
maybe one of the truest things that could be said about me (if anyone knew me well enough) is how i never do so well when i have nothing to place my too intense heart inside of. and i might feel like it's shaking in my own ****** hands, but maybe i am daydreaming and maybe if you look close, you could see something the knife gave me.

you saw me in the dark, the night i asked you not to touch me, and i have twisted fantasies, and i know this side of me so well that i was sickly amused when i found the blade in the bathroom drawer that i had been searching for that night.

You said "you need to be stronger"
So I pulled my armor on
Can't keep this up much longer
And it was my fault when you were gone
Because I wanted you too much
And I needed you, too bad
And I always said I'm sorry
But you took advantage of that
There you are months after,
You're joking that I could never win a fight
With you and it broke my heart
That you were right.
Cause I wanted you happy
I couldn't stand to see you lose
I wanted you more than everything
So I stayed, for you to use.
You were hurting and I couldn't see
That maybe there was some way
You weren't right for me.
But how could that be?
I wanted you desperately.
So you left and you took my heart
And it was never harder to be apart
I was longing for you in tears on my bed
You didn't care how many I shed
You drove home in silence
And I tried to stop crying
And I spent the next months
Trying and trying and trying
But it wasn't enough,
You called your own bluff
Said you couldn't do this
But couldn't you have figured that out
Before you found my lips to kiss?
Anyway
I found a way to survive
Fake it til you make right?
Just smile and you'll be okay in a while
Doesn't matter if you're falling apart
That's the best lesson you gave me,
Along with how to break a heart

the first day was hard and the fourth day was harder, this week has been the longest of my life.
i desperately want to dive back into our week together,
let's just relive it and we'll
sleep and drink everything else away.
i'll go to bed tonight and dream again of a time that is too far away
where I never tell you goodbye again. just goodnight.

wait
wait
i can't keep trying to skate
right over the ice of a heart never healed
scars poorly sealed
this sickness is unreal
and
the pain i feel?
surreal
slow down
slow down
as i drag you along at the speed of sound
i'll pick you up and pretend it was you
whose body smashed into the ground
but, please, take me around
show me your town
do you know what's happening right now?
of course i don't, i won't
i still am what i swear i am not
i will still love you when my body rots
a line on my leg is a tear on your face
when i am myself, i can't hurt you that way
it's still flying past me
a million miles
a millisecond
burning
aching
yearning
waiting

I misjudge my own feelings. I change my mind constantly. I have to make the wrong choice five times before I make the right one and understand why it’s right. Sometimes, quite often, these faults --no--habits will confuse you. I’ll tell you I need to be left alone ten minutes before I need you more than I have ever needed you before. I will be most energetic when I feel I will soon collapse into a sea of sadness. I will infuriate and disappoint you while I make countless, hasty, bad decisions as I try to alleviate the symptoms of life. I will say it once but not more: I am sorry for these things about me, only because they will sometimes negatively impact you. I am me. I am worth it.

time lapse
Collapse
time and again
I
i will let myself down
Love's never done anything but fall short
and neither have i
Can't stop shaking
to shake it off

broken again.
it comes and goes, right?
or what do you call the spaces between
where i've mastered how to human
throughout the day,
the times when I can say hello and goodbye
and laugh at unfunny jokes
and do what's expected
and take my medicine,
would i call it unbroken so long as i am not sobbing in a ball on the floor?
it hits when it hits.
and sometimes it's one thing at a time.
sometimes i am struck with the notion
that his heart breaks in his chest every day and that it is my fault
and sometimes i only recall the times he was kicking me in the stomach
and then it's both
or maybe it's the life we lost or all three
or a completely different loss of a different person or a different fallout
or a different pain that i caused
a different wound i am responsible for
or a different time when my heart was ripped from my chest
occasionally i get slammed with memories from a time when i should have been protected, sometimes i remember things that can't possibly be in my range of memory

sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less, sometimes it's a combination, sometimes it is none of the above. it is never gradual. it hits, it hurts. like concrete and broken glass. i can't control it, but i am broken again.

she loves you with her whole heart
but isn't it way too easy to make her fall apart?
in some numb trance from the words you said,
she kept on her clothes and lied down in your bed.
few words spoken and nothing close to a touch.
you probably didn't know that your words hurt her so much,
because she faced away from you and silently cried out her whole heart.
it's just way too easy to make her fall apart.

no
I don't want anyone else around
get them out of our life
forget her and we'll forget everyone
that led our hearts to here
leave it all behind
look down the road and never back
it's the only way to survive but now
we could thrive
you can hate the love songs
and I can hate the past
because I just have to love your eyes on me
your hands on my back
your smile against my lips
maybe every month
maybe every once
in a really difficult while

we're here now
and
I can't
stand to think
of all the nights
you'll be missing from me

I feel guilty being reminded
Of all the many moments my heart ached for you
While I was supposed to belong to someone else.
I feel guilty
For also feeling something so right
About my entire existence yearning for you when you were a thousand miles away, years in my past. Your words were ghosts in me,
I had finally, finally forgotten your scent unless I tried really, really hard,
(Your smile, I admit, was branded in the chambers of my heart. It would never leave me, and I never wanted it to,)
and I had everything my brain thought I needed then,
But I didn't
And my heart and soul knew it.


In the most honest of dawns and dusks,
Logic forsaken me, my heart and I packed up and ran to you.




Is the wrong thing really the wrong thing if you do it for the most profound, paramount of all reasons?
Would the people we hurt forgive us if they felt the depth and truth of our reasons?; of this love? If they knew it was so meant to be, we may as well have our very own North star in the sky to guide us together always, a stack of novels and poetry and art that this love inspired?


It's a funny kind of guilt.
I believe I did wrong...  I do.
I also believe I would do a million times worse for you.

baby
baby
I wanna make your stomach flip
but I have never been deserved by anyone
I have always been too good
too kind
too much too soon
too ready to be loved
the way
I always should have been

i start by telling her i am convinced there are almost no moments that matter,
like really profoundly matter,
and i am subliminally convinced of this, especially when i am alone.
but then i swear to her, there i was all alone in a basement staring a small, blurry two dimensional copy of you,
and when i look at your smile in the photo, mine grows bigger
and i let out this soft, unintentional laugh,
at the exact moment i feel tears rolling down my face, and my body seems to know before my heart does, and my heart knows before my mind does.  
and i knew then.
i knew then that i was wrong, that i was not stuck in a series of inutile moments that in grand design, meant nothing at all. if all the other moments i thought a waste led me here, i valued them.
this moment was a brick wall and a cleansing rain. it was the absolute moment i knew i would spend my life happily earning your trust, your time, your heart.
i tell her this with relief on my breath because the hurricane in my head named after you has settled, and i am more than ready to start building back up.

When someone goes missing from your life, the clock slows to some kind of impossible speed where you're sure no time is actually passing at all.
Somehow, painfully and miraculously, it's been six days. But, still, you feel they've been gone a million years.
And you would give anything if they could just be here in this, any, and every moment with you.
You're craving them like they were a drug and now you're washed out, you can try to have a good time with anyone else but your best times are to be had roughly 850 miles away, or in the future, or five nights ago.

Scars on my wrists, scars on my legs,
“Stop hurting yourself,” he begs.
Can’t stop crying. “I’m just so tired,” I sigh.
I’m alone, and I think I want to die.

maybe you'll get lucky and you'll be someone like I used to know who gets to say "nothing really bad had ever happened to me"
maybe you'll get lucky and be someone like I thought I was who gets to say "yeah, it was bad, but I'm fine"

maybe you'll be thirteen and it'll all happen way too fast.

maybe you'll be fourteen and perfect will go downhill so steeply you'll break every bone as you tumble down.

maybe at fifteen you'll learn loss like you shouldn't have known for decades, and then spend your time convincing yourself not to die.

maybe you'll be sixteen and endure a goodbye so horribly complicated that you won't be able to make sense of it, and you'll give up trying. maybe that year you'll find your favorite hello.

maybe seventeen brings your fiercest love and your biggest fall and your hardest crash. seventeen leaves you crawling, bloodied, into the safest place you can find.

maybe then you're questioning that this isn't the way it should be. maybe you're asking why it all had to happen to you.



maybe you spend three years in your own head, trying to escape, numbing yourself over and over, and for your own sanity, blocking everything out.

eighteen.

nineteen.

twenty.



maybe you'll be twenty-one when it all finally hits you. maybe the "you're too young for this" you heard at thirteen finally makes sense. the "are you sure you're okay?"'s of fourteen will echo in your head. you'll hear your fifteen year old self shrugging off the shock of "you're sure handling this well". and you will know now you never handled it at all.

you will feel it all at twenty-one, a little more every day. maybe your mind was protecting you until now. maybe now you're thinking you can handle it. you can't. you aren't ready. you wish it would go away.

maybe it will.

we finished a long goodnight kiss
you rested your hand on my hip
i could never thank you enough for never holding me too tight
yet i found myself wishing, hoping...........praying
Please, never let her let me go
Please, if you could give me this one thing
Please, keep her by my side
i dont pray, i dont believe
but i was asking someone
i was begging for any being more powerful than myself
i prayed for her to keep me always
i prayed to have her goodnight kiss
and her beautiful hands to always hold me
for my love to never let go

Burning gas and my lungs is better than sitting alone with all the empty time to think
Think about the tears and layers of neosporin that you went through trying desperately to make the lines heal without a trace
Trace the lines of her face on the cold screen because it makes you feel closer to her somehow
Somehow you're carrying on, you feel weight of the universe on your shoulders and you're too dizzy to stand much longer
Longer than the miles between seems to be the time until you next have her in your arms
Arms that are weary and sore and cut up, but they still pull and reach and grab and push
Push everyone away until you're alone again, bridges are what you're best at burning.

whispering words of wisdom, let it be.
let it go, free your hands from your mangled heart, let it heal. in all kindness to yourself, don't go back. you held your breath, even if it hurts to breath again,
it's time to breathe again. lying on the floor in a mess of hungover emotions, so strong you tremble at the mercy of your thoughts. at any moment it could all hit you, you would fall apart in front of all these people you have carefully, manipulatively fed lies of okay-ness. what if it crumbles you? stand back up, because I swear to god if there was one universal truth that I could convince everyone of, it would be, "there is no shame in the truth of emotion." so why am I holding all my feelings and truths like ***** weights? if I believed for myself the things I believe for others, if I just allowed myself to feel the way I accept others do, would I be so messed up? boxed up? maybe if it were for these words, I would explode.
maybe if I went back, changed how I withheld, changed how I gave up, maybe

Oh god

maybe...

You told me to come out of my head,
and I told you I was a prisoner there.
You told me I had the power to change it all.
I told you that you didn't understand.
You insisted I could ignore the thoughts that haunted me,
and then I tried to believe you.      
I was a goner for sure,
but you spoke to me like I meant something to this world.        
And I think you saved my life again.

i've always been a liar.

did you know i can't lie to you?

i cant do it.

i am a wonderful liar, i think i was born with it.

my talents are wasted on your captivating soul.

i can't lie to you, it hurts me. i don't know how.

how did you make me feel these things?
i honestly thought i was some kind of sociopath,
and you came along and made me feel.

I've got a few tethers, each one is stretched. I'm trying so hard to do right.
I've never followed rules, even my own.
It may have been easier alone.
Resistance to give, that's all it is.
But couldn't we just run away from it all and live free,
walk tall and just be?
This is getting a little ******* me..

Tell me everything I've said that still haunts you. Tell me what you wish I'd say. Tell me all the things you think are too unimportant to bother saying. I promise I'll be interested. I'll always want to hear.
Tell me where your mind goes when I mention I'm unhappy. Tell me what would make you happy.
Tell me what you went through while you were missing from my life. Tell me about that really dark time when you didn't know if you'd make it.
Tell me about the happy times when you knew you'd be okay.
Tell me anything.
I want you to know,
I want to know
everything.

I went numb for a while, 'cause it was easier than all the questions
and all the depression. But I also think maybe I was numb before that,
probably a little more each day since I lost a bit of myself, and then I lost a lot more.
Life is just too much to let it all in, you know? How is one young soul supposed to absorb it all?
I think we shut it all out and we get selfish, because it is one hundred million times easier to focus on our own silly little problems than to think of those that suffer horrendous crimes, families who starve, or even to think of the brutalities animals face so we can have a dinner we prefer.
What about the lonely people?
How could you live a carefree life if you let in the thought of how many people you've hurt, or how those few hurt you? God, no.
Why would you? It'd be torture. You let that go, even if it takes a while.

But what if you can't? What if it turns out, you aren't like the rest? What if all the sadnesses and tragedies keep you up at night? What if you're 19 and you're pretty sure life is eventually going to be so ******* much that it will inevitably crush you? What if you are scared to death that you operate so differently than other humans, that you won't make the cut?

What if you're shaking and crying in bed at 11:58 pm, after a day of putting in all the effort to act normal
and you are burying yourself in music praying to fall asleep before it all really hits you
and it occurs to you that empathy and worry and fear is going to drive you six feet under?

What will happen?

Leave me out with the waste
This is not what I do
It's the wrong kind of place
To be cheating on you
It's the wrong time
She's pulling me through
It's a small crime
And I've got no excuse

I have lived too much life
And it is not my fault I was born with love bleeding into my chest
I have a thousand things to apologize for, but I have always given full disclosure
Printed warning signs on my hands
Before I ever touched you
I'll tell anyone endlessly how I can't promise much anymore
I really am to blame for saying things I should not have, that's something I've mostly grown out of, I hold my thoughts behind my tongue for months and years sometimes until I am sure... But I can't change the words I gave you in a younger time
I can't wish hard enough I'd left you alone
And it's all for nothing while you bleed
You look at me, see what you need to see
I just wish you knew that I KNOW, and it makes me twist in ****** thorns understanding both sides.
I'm sorry.

You light my darkness.
You explode into nothing.
I really miss you.

Years pushing the darkness back into the shape of a shadow
even when she was slicing my back open to get back into me.
Years of lies after years of embracing unspeakable happenings. How could I have known it was okay not to be okay? I missed my chance to fall apart and heal properly. Then all I wanted was to forget his hands taking my breath and my voice and my love
and his cruelty taking... Everything else I had ever wanted.
And I wanted to forget the way I had let myself fall into an ocean of her love only to drown in it and beg for more to fill my lungs.
So I forced it all out of my mind because, Lord, I have finally faced it: as soon as my mind finds a way out, I take it. I take it and I run with it. I run wild trying to heal my barely beating heart and I hide, pathetic and alone in corners of the world that no one would think to look for me. I do not linger in pain and wait. I take what I can like a ******* thief in the night and hastily sew my heart together and calm my mind and lungs until I can carry on.
It worked for years. And years.
I... thank you for a moment of peace to think while you shelter me from the world of pain and reality of love and loss.
My eternally unsettled mind will continue and my heart will as always, try to keep beating.

We'll speak these words like sadness doesn't drip from every one of them.
We'll put on this act like everything is just fine while our hearts hurt in our chests.
We're going to hold on to what is available even though it's like gripping razor blades while we dangle over a black hole.
If we let go,  we're going to fall into the abyss, so we might as well stay with our bleeding hands.
And we will not mention the every-so-often feelings that will wash over us with yearning and impossible want, because what's the point in saying it out loud? It only kills me a little each time when I swallow the truth. What a small price to pay.

Something bad happened,
I was down for a few hours.
With the weeks and months
and life I've had,
I'm in awe; I didn't disintegrate in guilt.
You're constantly cleansing my mind.
Picking me up, nudging my chin to the sky. I don't think you know how easily you ameliorate my uneasiness.
After all this time, babe, I've learned to save myself. I can't let you be my everything, I can't let you be the sun.
But **** if you don't light up my world.

You're right there.

Quietly accepting.
We could let this drift away,
but I don't think you would.
Your poker face has even you fooled, love.
But over and over I'll put my cards on the table and I'll try not to stand up on my chair to tell you all about my heart and the things I know.

I'm trying really hard to be okay with what's been done to me
I feel more okay when I can do the things it takes to be okay
I feel more than okay when I'm going 100 miles an hour down the road I grew up on
I'd feel ******* great if I could destroy my body a little bit more
That's all I want
I just want to be okay
I want to forget

you were so used to hiding everything
from everyone,
you didn't know what to do
once someone knew all your secrets.

she would come to you falling apart at the seams. she would confess all her midnight tragedies and she would beg you for answers that she knew she would not find in you. she would cry and scream, it was not fair. you, scared to your core, glimpsed what a soul could go through and you told her it would be okay. you had no way of knowing that. you lied so as to keep her from slipping away into her deep sorrow and late vulnerability. and mere hours later, the sun would rise, and you would never be invited that deep into her mind ever again. you would never again feel her soul. she knew to look somewhere else for answers next time. she knew you did not understand.

There's nothing I can do
There's nothing I can do
There's nothing I can do
There's nothing I can do

I'd give anything to give this heart a rest.
If this were easy, maybe it wouldn't be worth it. But god, is this worth it? I'm cutting myself open, I'm letting my heart tear itself apart, I'm causing hurt and harm. This is something I cannot handle.

The one way you're bad for me, and I find the good in it.

I hope you're okay
It's not like you not to fight back
But I don't have the right anymore
So I hope somebody in your corner
Is holding your hand and
making sure your eyes match your words
I really hope
Someone is looking out for you
Like you looked out for me

there will be days your hands feel weak and it will hurt your legs to walk forward, your skin will feel ready to break and your head will feel so heavy on your shoulders. there will be moments you talk yourself into giving up, there will be moments when you settle for the best you could do. there will be lovers that make you feel like you already gave up, there will be one lover who will always love you best. she'll make your skin stronger. there are going to be days and sometimes longer stretches of weeks and months when you will crave nothingness and you will feel like you have failed when you have not. you don't have to always give your best. it's okay that you don't have the energy to sprint towards perfection every day. you are sad and you are loved and you are lovely though you'd disagree, you are in pain and doing your best to be okay. it's okay.

my heart ached
lament of displacement
while i was committed
to someone who was not you
that was wrong
i was in the wrong place with the wrong one
you were in the wrong place because you were anywhere without me
i get that we have to make mistakes to learn and i get that we have to have the bad to appreciate good and i really, really understand why we had to go through that time where the whole entire universe felt wrong
i could sit for hours in one place inside my head
there were times you were a hundred thoughts
out of ten in my mind
and i could lie in the wrong bed and only want you
and cry for you and know how it would never be okay again
because i knew, i was so certain,
i would never have you again


you told me, last night, in my bed, right where you belong, you told me
you were so happy
and your eyes were so soft and warm, looking at me like you meant it,
and your smile, your smile was the stuff of dreams