People don't love the way they used to. My mom taught me that. You taught me everything else. We, in a state of mock individuality, look for the good part of ourselves in others so we have a good reason to love them better than we hate ourselves, because we are too afraid to admit that we aren't terrible things. So I keep checking my yard to see if you had been asleep when you crashed into my lawn (but that is never the case). And it's not even because I'm looking for the good parts of myself in you, it's because I'm just looking for someone who doesn't care that there is no good part of myself to look for. No matter where I sit, my feet always dangle off the ground. And that's what life is like : an infinite state of dangling; a throne of questions, and we never quite touch the ground.
Summer doesn't feel like freedom when you've spent the whole winter in love. Buried beneath the crushing weight of my own frozen apologies and punching my feelings into deaf ears like the clock on a workday, I keep twirling in circles, trying to check the serial number on the back of my neck in vain. I am falling, but not into you and so it is more of a fast crash in slow motion that nobody can feel but me. I'm tired of spinning. I'm tired of digging for reasons like a stick in the ground. I know I'm not a dog, but I never learn. Oh my God, I never learn. And neither do you.

I am crippling away at the thought of not being here next to you without the slight of your smile against mine
And I realize now that I have taken for granted every moment our hands have accidentally touched
And your smile still brightens my world and there is not much light in it at all without you and without you
I think I’m driving down the wrong side of the highway without my headlights on
Without you I think I am a pen that has long ran out of ink and at this point I’m just scratching away at scarred paper.
There will be no time to heal when I don’t want to heal when I’m not with you.
I’m trying to learn how to be my own mortician with all this alone time.

When the thought of missing you hurts worse than being stricken in bed with your hands behind your back and a stomach full of an anxious history, filled with a marked up calendar of therapy dates,
that is when I will miss you the most.
The thought of missing you is pumping heavy venom into my heart.
Thinking of you like this, with an empty mind, prompts me to think of what it will be like, two years from now
when I am still stuck laying in that same
grieving
position.
I cannot move without you,
and I cannot bear to imagine my days and my darks without you holding my hand and guiding my blind ways.
Because what am I without the love of my life?
And exactly how many miles apart are our fingertips before they can touch?
When I roll over in the dead of night,
I expect to find your naked body to hold,
but all I discover grasping is another layer of bed sheet.
I miss you with a vengeance.
I miss you so bad, all I can taste is blood in my food.
And you are not even gone yet.

It would be nice to have you right now beside me to fill the spaces between my fingers. But I know you are your own person and I cannot summon you any time I wish. So I’ll settle for thoughts of you and the uncertainty of when we’ll meet. And I’ll love you as the spaces between my fingers until you can fill them up again.

-D.D.

He is next to you
and he is real
and you have never felt skin so warm.

You've never been held like you were really meant to be here and you've never held yourself and you're afraid because never have you ever felt so in place never have you known a home like this and in the backseat of his car and while it's cold,
never have you felt so alive.

And skin on skin has never felt so alike and his inhales and his exhales have never been anything but the world's greatest mystery or a rising and setting sun or a room filled with nothing but moonlight that you've been dying to solve since the day you heard his laugh boom and boom in your brain like an avalanche ready to melt ready to **** ready to resonate forever in that bright part of you for the rest of heaven knows how long and I guess that means until we make love again.

His body: the entirety of every single spec of his being, is praying grounds.
And I will worship every spectrum of the all reasons I love him until I can tell you just what I mean through every word I say, without blinking an eye, without breaking a sweat, by only accomplishing the impossible.

And when you find that you love someone else, more than you love yourself, please realize, that that, is not love.
You are only halfway there, and you are not caught in his repertoire of thunder
of thrashing lacking oxygen under layers and layers of the ocean and wanting nothing more than to be side by side
until you find that you are in love with yourself too.
Until you can stand still in a tsunami and still speak the words, "I am not there yet, but I am okay."

He is beauty sealed in flawless flaws and even these I fantasize about.
All of which I can recall like the back of my hand but I know his better
and I want you to know I think I love you more than anybody has loved anybody and I will
always,
as tenderly as I can,
when our dreams come true of soft light through white bed sheets highlighting the patches of hair on your face that you hate so much and your lack of a six pack,

Know that you are lacking nothing.

Because you are everything.

You are every last droplet of beautiful in this world
you are every single ounce of hope that lies deep within me
you are so much of the sweet that I want so badly to grasp in the throbbing palms of my loving hands
needy, only for you,
and I would not have you any other way.

I want you just as you are, as purely as I can have you, for as long as I can.
I want to make you know that you are, in every form, the most entirely breath taking human being that has ever graced this existence of ours.

In a vow to you:
May my pulse never run cold.

I always save the best for last and I dream words that spell out your name in my sleep
I think that's why I always wake up with my chest numb
It's exhausted its bones trying to save the nimble thing behind it that pulls at every string attached to our lives
Looking for someone worth the ache
Trying to find someone worth breaking for.