You have since forgotten the stale aroma of old books, how they once stretched your afternoons into nights that ended in the final flutters of heavy eyelids and young hearts beating with flustered adrenaline.
An eternity has separated your fingertips from the edges of creased paper memories that have since faded into faint flickers of yesterdays, wilted and tarnished like the handles of childhood bicycles left out in the rain.

The thrill of disappearing into the spines of stories where your name could be whisked away into the summer wind and forgotten, every mistake ever committed melting within the spaces of all of the words you were once too afraid to write yourself.

Chasing thrills was only ever appropriate for the innocent.

And you remember being young—living without thinking twice about the hands of the clock and their lonely waltz, never worrying about crossing off monotonous boxes on the calendar and or where tomorrow would begin. Instead, you’d just wake, wiping away the hazy violet sleep from your eyes, your little fingers sounding out the words existing upon unfamiliar pages you were still too small to understand.

But now you do. You are full of understanding. The way time slips through bigger hands that have grown strong and calloused with the weight of your own troubles, how you have learned that trying to catch it after the fall is equivalent to waiting for yesterdays to come knocking at your front porch. The way days never return home, never send you letters, never call first.

Comfort sleeps in the knowledge of temporary. Time is fleeting. Perhaps love is too, but you are still too soft to know this yet. Still too eager to be left out in the rain.

And when you finally curl up with a stack of paperback nostalgia, you are greeted with neglected lives and heroes that exist far beyond the ones you have broken yourself to be saved by.

*You  have been busy chasing thrills this entire time.
You have only ever been innocent.

So often we hear stories about love. It is a word that slips easily off the tongue as if it is made of only the finest silk. It has become a mumbled concept that we poke fun at, the joke someone tiredly decided to crack at a birthday party because everyone has already memorized the punchline. Love, the deepest of all popular clichés, sits prominently upon pedestals within the stanzas of sappy high school poetry and in the elderly eyes of companions that have spent decades of their lives blooming in adoration. Love, the only child of fear and fearlessness, is the friend you invite to the party out of pity because your mother told you to. Yes, we are all drastically different people; from ethnicity to personality, and language to beliefs. Diversity is potent, harboring oceans of colorful ideas that define the nature of beauty itself. It keeps the human race buzzing with truth, extremely vital to the development of who we are all becoming. And just like ourselves, there exists many different kinds of love. Loving ourselves. Our families. Our friends. Our passions. Another person whose existence gives life itself infinite value. Each other. As people, we cannot be defined by labels. We cannot be packaged and wrapped into pretty little categories of where we fit solely based on the events of our pasts. We cannot only exist interpreted by where we have been and what we have seen. We are not just where we truly feel the most at home or what we choose to fill the empty space where the puzzle piece we have spent years searching for belongs. In fact, we are not just anything. You cannot define your worth by the way you sign your name, because when all is said and done, the only thing that is visible is the curvy loops in the way you penned the first letter with only ink and paper. No skin. No bone. No fight. No dream. The roads you have traveled to get to today’s destination do not matter as much as you think they should. A recovering alcoholic. The girl who survived an arduous battle with cancer. The teenage guy whose future feels impossible to decipher. A middle aged man who quit his job in order to seek true happiness. These are just fragments, broken glass pieces of who we are. Only a cropped, blurry photograph. Never the full picture. Love allows us to zoom out. Love permits us a chance to view the bigger picture, to expand our hearts in order to make sense of not only ourselves, but the chaos that has surrounded us for as long as we have been conscious enough to remember it. What does a sixteen year old girl of an uneventful town have to say about love that is so important or even worth the time of day to listen to? The answer, like ourselves, cannot be answered so simply. It sounds silly, unheard of, for a young woman of such a tender age to believe that she has the wisdom to understand the many facets of the foundations of love. However, there is so much electricity she has stored from the hands of time, the gifts of observation, and priceless experience to bleed out into words so that the people who told her she was too young to possibly understand a fraction of its meaning will realize that she did. She does. Or at least, she is beginning to. This one is for you. Perhaps you have been taught to treat love like a swear word, the estranged family member that disappeared from your household Christmas card collection. Perhaps you are trembling to experience it for yourself, rather than hearing what it must be like to hold the hand of a silhouette that does not desire only to let go. Perhaps you have spent years believing that love is only a feeling. Only positive. Only fluttery. Only romantic. It is not always such. It is a force that, much like a Category 5 hurricane, cannot be reckoned with. But “cannot” hardly ever resonates with “should not,” and so I beg you, that when the winds disturb the shutters, sometimes it is beneficial to keep the window open. Let love envelope you. Let it love you. Whether you like it or not, you are the home that will not crumble in the gentlest of breezes or the most treacherous of gusts. You are strong enough for love because that is what you are made of. Not just blood or tears or cheek-to-cheek grins. You are made of love. This package of love is the only category we should cease to be afraid of. Love, of all forms, is who we are.

I am having trouble writing.
It is as if there is a wall of bulletproof glass separating me from the words that are dying to escape the metal cage they are kept in. I am the only one with a key sitting comfortably in the pockets of my jeans, but no matter how hard I pound my fists against the wall, I do not get any closer to quieting the agonizing screams emerging from the trap. They get louder, aching for liberation, tethering their syllables around the bars as they sit, confined within a reality I am desperate to free them from.

They are starving to live. I can see the outlines of their bones through the transparent letters that blanket their elastic limbs, each day growing more tired, forgetting the taste of hope every minute that passes. I can feel them collecting dust, shrinking down to fragile skeletons that have begun to lose meaning. What if one day I will no longer be able to see them? What if one day I have nothing left to save?

I am starving to live. I cannot feel love without a knife stuck wedged in the back of my throat reminding me that I have nothing to describe it with. I can give all of myself to the one who thankfully accepts it but my teeth chatter at the thought of having to apologize for stealing joy from the cookie jar. I am sorry for having no words to say sorry. They told me to tell you that they are sorry for their absence, but I do not know how to say this without them.

For now, I am waiting. The same way I do for Fridays, for your call, for my heartbeat to obey the speed limit, for time to run dry.

I will continue to wait
patiently, tiredly, averting my eyes to the hopes that maybe tomorrow, they will be small enough to squeeze through the bars and set me free.

the poet smiles at her reflection
in a mug of English breakfast,
tiny sips of truth as she dreams
of the return of her muse

and as expected,
today he is silent

dotting her i’s with his lopsided grins
she hums quietly,
sealing the thousandth one
she will never get around to sending

using kisses as postage stamps,
she adds another to a pile
of flimsy envelopes addressed
to a ghost
who cannot answer.

Sometimes, when the world is still
I find faces in the tile cracks
of the bathroom floor

Tainted with age and despair,
they are trapped where ceramic
meets skin

It is with them that I worry,
crushed like expired cherry blossom petals
that litter the streets of early summer

It is with them that I sigh
for freedom,
Maybe we have time
but it does not
have us.

life is a cosmic joke
he said
as he drained his glass of purpose
she watched as he paid and turned to leave
his movements proving his point
for what real purpose do we have
when all we do is live and die
and whisper to deities in the sky.

life is a cosmic joke
she said
when the till was short again
and drinks were missing from their bottles
as meaning was from her existence
he watched as she left
for the very last time
from a job that she hated
like the life he despised

life is a cosmic joke
he said
as he lit up his last cigarette
and sat in the cold outside his bar
next to a homeless man
with as little hope of a good long life
as anyone else he'd ever met
in a world of perpetual sunset

life is a cosmic joke
he said
as he warmed his hands
over a dying fire
with a young man
who was lost or some such
he took the ragged gloves off his hands
and tried to feel his fingers again
in vain
as all the world is
in trying to find some hidden bliss

life is a cosmic joke
he said
as he crossed another identical street
next to a woman or maybe a girl
who was crying about a lost lover
he walked and he wandered
but he never found it
even with all his persistence
as we never find meaning for our existence

life is a cosmic joke
she said
as she wept into my hair
mascara running down her cheeks
as she told of her terrible break up
and the way he used to hit her  
and how she was glad he was gone
but how she wished he would come back
her indecision mirroring that of all the world
do we matter or are we matter
which illusion is left to shatter

life is a cosmic joke
I wrote
over and over
like some meaningful quote
as if it mattered if it was in a poem
or if someone read it
it doesn't need to be said
to be known
it stands on its own

life is a cosmic joke

We’re sitting on the plaid couch in my basement, your hand in mine like a puzzle piece we took forever to find. It’s when we’re doing nothing when I realize that I want to do everything with you. It is almost always winter in my mind, my thoughts permanently frozen in time, paralyzed to my bed sheets the way icicles cling to shivering windowpanes. But with you, it’s different, our blossoming love proving the existence of a perpetual spring. We grow wildly- like two oak trees embraced behind the fence in my backyard, our branches intertwined and our roots firmly entrusted in the dampness of the soil. Not even the strongest breath of wind could destroy us.
And we walk hand-in-hand in the breath of October, the kind that stings like knives to the bone. You forget to bring a jacket with you but you insist that you are perfectly fine, that the electricity radiating between our fingers is enough to keep you warm for a collection of intoxicating eternities. And to us, the rest of the world barely exists, their watchful eyes and orchestral voices like anthems proclaiming the silliness of our juvenile love, a bright-eyed girl in a violet trench coat and a boy with a smile so bright it’s almost as if she had accidentally fallen in love with the rays of the sun. The kind of livid brightness that warms the coldest of hearts, the darkest of rooms.
But we walk to the neighborhood coffee shop with the combined tranquility of two retired lovers strolling through Paris and the frenzied excitement of exhilarated children on the seemingly endless journey to Disney World. Every welcoming front porch and townhouse we pass feels empty in comparison to the home we created within us, with a fire permanently kindled in our souls and between our restless fingers. You kiss me where the sidewalk ends, between the trees that resemble the magnificence we have become- the sky melting every molecule of transparent sadness I had left within me through an endless palette of pastel bliss. And in that moment, we become the fragile remnants of summer heat stuck trapped and misunderstood in the birth of autumn.