gentle                                        but kind, your
touch                                         sends shivers through my veins,
down                                         my spine, across the plains of my
skin.                                          you are
careful,                                      as though i might be startled and
run away.                                 you're wary, and with good
reason,                                      because i am restless and a flight
risk.                                           i am the whipping wind and the weighted
anchor,                                     the concurrent push and pull, rise and
fall                                            of the churning tide. your fingertips slide across
my                                            skin. my gut rolls and twists, tightly coiling, injecting my
body                                         with venom and excitement and lust and longing. you
ignite                                        my neuroses and sparks fly; firecrackers bursting against a
clear,                                         star-lit July canvas. splatters of paint
coat                                           the world and my sight blacks out for light years and milliseconds
all at once.                                i shiver but bite it back, revolting against the warm
chill                                           clutching at my bones, vying for survival.
powerless                                  to you, even when i know in my heart i have to
accept                                       that there is nothing to become of
us, no                                        more than the dance of two partners at a
masquerade                             whose fates are only temporarily entwined. thread tickles my wrist,
i laugh,                                     and i hold my tongue. i hold back
every ******* word,                like it's a dam about to burst and sweep away everything,
devastating                              the entire world. my words could
destroy                                     what i have gained, what i have settled for, what i have
done.                                        what have i done? .  .  . but the words slink back
inside,                                      always on the brink, never to be heard or
seen.                                        i wish to see you gone, like the sun to the moon and like the moon to the sun.                                        yet there was comfort,
knowing you'd return.          knowing that you'd
always                                    circle back around, constantly on each other's tails, a
thrilling chase.                       the end is nigh, the sky is burning red, the world is on
fire.                                         flames lick the tips of my toes, race up my arms, and
ashes                                      of my safety net tumble and glide
down, all around me.            hazards surround me. i am a
hazard.                                  you are a road block and a shortcut, one i find myself led to in
temptation.                            let me free, guide me home, be
the one -                                 or perhaps, maybe... no? the
bittersweet goodbye,             the final tears - i hope- will be
freed                                       in five months time. five months is not even a
moment.                                not when you're praying that time
slows, crawls, halts.              the harder i cling, the further away
you go.                                   your fingers leave my wrist,
leaving                                  behind lilac string as a reminder. my heart
collapses                               on itself. five months is not enough. the twenty
seconds                                 were not enough, not even as you
touched me.                         shaken, fighting laughter and fears and
tears,                                     watch me shove it away. the
inevitable                             only comes around, only is real, when you're forced to
face it.                                  and i will not accept that you're gone until you're finally, actually
gone.

Dearest,

This thing is claiming me again. I write only to express a great need to see you, or call you, or maybe even crank up the engine of this beat up junker I'm sitting in now. I'd very much like to see you again, or once more, even if it were just your eyes. It's been three years. Three years since I last heard your voice, or laugh, or saw you smile. ****, do I miss that smile. It's been three years since you left without a decent goodbye, you ***. You never had a ******* clue - but, anyway. That's not why I'm here.

I was thinking of you today, as I have every single one before and will continue to until my breathing ceases. Did you know it's the anniversary of when I realized I was hopelessly in love with you? Of course you don't. I never told you about that moment, or how I really felt. I swore I might, before you were gone, but it's been three years and I never did. So that's that, I guess. This is such a waste, writing to you. Yet here I am, painstakingly scrawling these thoughts whirling around in my brain on to a sheet of loose leaf paper. The best part is knowing I'll never send this to you. This is going to sit here in my pocket until I wash it, or burn it when I'm searching for the cigarettes I don't smoke, or even lose it on my walk through the city.

I walk every day, and not just to and from places. I walk to think. I walk to clear my head. Instead, I will pass somewhere you've been -- somewhere we've been -- and I will be right where I started again, plagued by the ghost of you on every new corner, in the middle of the crowds, and at the foot of the subway stairs. You are everywhere, darling.

You'd be laughing at this point, probably. You'd be thinking that I ramble like I used to and still don't manage to say enough to ever convince you that I'm true. Or maybe you'd be thinking how wasteful this is to this sheet of paper. How unfair that this piece of paper gets to carry this nonsensical message to you -- or not, actually -- and how unfair that it gets to sit in my pocket, close enough to be lost. Or maybe you wouldn't think that at all, and you'd be just blankly reading all of this and wondering whether I'm just bullshitting around the truth, like I've always done oh-so-well.

Or maybe you'd just be thinking that this is so typical of me, keeping things I'll never do anything with for the sake of keeping them. You always thought I liked the act of keeping things rather than the things themselves. Perhaps you're right, because I've always wished I could both keep you and be rid of you and the toxicity you bring.

But at the end of the day, I'm the one writing you. Maybe my feelings learn towards the former of those two extremes.

Anyway, you would have been right about the bullshitting thing. I'm really writing because the emptiness is back, eating me out and wringing my guts inside out, and it isn't even pleasurable. I wrote because I haven't done so in some time, and it's been a long time since I wrote one of these one-sided letters to you. I used to write more; I used to have dozens, even, though I never wrote those on loose leaf paper in an old junker, heat off in the middle of winter. Really, I'm freezing right now. This is ridiculous. And I've got to stop bullshitting to you, I do.

You know, I can almost hear you responding to this. I can hear your voice somewhere in the back of my mind, answering me. And maybe that makes me more insane than I ever was. Maybe this hollowed out body has finally been done in, and I'm just beginning my descent into the clutches of insanity... or maybe I just can't tell you the truth.  You know me well, you do.

The truth is that I ******* miss you so much, it hurts to breathe. It physically causes my chest to ache, for pain to shoot through my entire body with each pump of my heart. Unfortunately, my heart is beating ceaselessly and my breathing has yet to stop by choice, so it hurts every day, every single second. I am always missing you. There is no other truth but that.

I think that, by allowing myself to write this, I'm hoping this idea of you can save me. I know already that this is the dumbest thing I've let myself hope for, more stupid than letting myself hope for you and for change and for happiness. The point is, letting myself do this at all is stupid, But I can't stop myself. You are worse than any drug I've ever known, and I pity those whose lives you have touched only because I know what it's like to be cut off from you. God forbid you leave them, someday, and they end up like me. Or a few shades less crazy than me.

I haven't even eaten because of this emptiness. I can't eat, actually. If I feed the monster, it erupts and soaks me with self hatred. I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid to do anything to infuriate it, and it's always angry. It's always whispering to me, sexily and sweet, asking me to do things that are so wrong. I'm not listening, and I'm staying clean, but it's hard, dearest. It's so hard when you've got nothing to cling to, nothing to even dream about hoping for.

This emptiness takes and takes, and it does not give back anything but empty caverns and the memory of what it was to feel. It takes everything I've got and it dumps it on the ground, spreads it around and sullies it. And when it's tattered and worn and filthy and unrecognizable, it crumbles it between its fingers like it's nothing but ash. I hate this behemoth more than I hate living through it. It's never-ending, the terrors it brings, and it pounds against me when I trap it away. It is invincible though, and it will always win. It's invincible in the way I believed we once had been, a long time in the past. Like us, I am not as invincible as I dreamed.

I'm sorry if I've worried you. I didn't mean to tell you, not truly. But now that the words are out, I seem to be a bit less empty than I was. Maybe I'll find my way out of this... maybe. I hope you are well, and smiling, and the world treats you kindly. I hope the night sky is beautiful where you are, and the lights glimmer in the distance exactly as you've imagined them. You deserve it a thousand times over me.

-A.C.

It's starting again.

I can feel the emptiness nestling in my joints.

With each drop in temperature, the
evils begin spiraling inside
of my mind as I fall
to the hounds.

I don't care. I don't blink.
It has no effect on me
anymore.

In my mind, I am smoking away
the tears and choking fears. Wispy tendrils of
heather gray caress my thin, chapped
lips with love. I am wearing
leather and black and there are
silver knuckles
gracing my lily white skin, marred
only by my ******, bitten nails and
your ink. I am
embracing
the demons, letting them drive
me away on chrome plated chariots, just
to get away, to run faster than God
itself, to the end -
the finish line -
they can't catch me;
they won't catch me yet,
not today.

In reality, I am buried
by layers of fat and years of secrets. I am
nothing but easily forgotten, and I
breathe in the esse of other lives, as if
they can save me or take hold, can grab
me tight, can pull my head high above suffocating
midnight waves. I am an
actor only by the smiles that convince me of a performance
well done. I am a liar, a
**** good one.

I'm not even excited for Christmas.
The tree, the lights, the frosty
air does nothing to arouse a festive
spirit or a hopeful mood. This is my only tell.
I have never lost
this one hope, this sole
light. Never have I lost
all - just you, though that has
always felt like a loss
larger than life.

"**** it all," I whisper.
Because no one cares, and we
are a selfish race. We are self-
absorbed, drowning in our own sorrows, and
clinging to desperate attempts of connecting.

It's starting again, and this time, I can
taste it on my tongue. Bitter, copper, heavy and
foul. Perhaps, if I believed in salvation, I
could afford
hope. For now, though, hope is an
empty bottle of water in the Sahara, and it is
foreign and massive and dark and looming.

Eating me alive.

We are all part of the Dead Poets Society,
in that we are all adeptly capable
of free thought and expression.

The difference, between
true romantics and the (in)expressive realists,
lies in the passionate mumblings which echo across prairies.

The difference is simply that we
cling to life, to dreams, to desperation and to death
as though they are the buoys of a great journey - invincible.

While the realists puncture holes
in dreams and death alike,
sinking with abstract thoughts like great boulders - motionless.

The difference between two polar opposites
is the brazen stroke of being
and the frenzied, wild dash of living.

"I'll be right back",
"See you soon",
"I love you" -
all code words for goodbye.

In a society of easily forgotten,
casually replaced, and faulty
relationships, I am one of them;
one of the ghosts.

Not privileged enough,
not quite as sharp,
nor do I have a fraction of their
glittering, Golden luster.

I fade instead,
floating in and out of view,
opaque in body;
I am naught.

With their gleaming teeth, sharp
wit and poisonous
tongues, you outshine all
in my unseeing eyes.

Through objective eyes, you
are equivalent to the ones I loathe,
and perhaps the Highest
Priest of the Golden.

Just as monstrous,
with poisonous fingertips
injecting my skin by accident,
intent to ****.

For you cause my chills,
and elevate my pulse,
and corrupt my nervous system,
eliciting pure, electric desire.

Maybe I do despise you,
the same as the other Goldens.
I might hate your grin, and
your silky, alluring voice.

Or, maybe, I only pretend -
confusion is the question,
yet your clumsy touches
are the deadly key.

the worst kind of Sad is not when Sad tries not to be Sad.

it is when Sad hides in your closet,
threading it's claws through the slightly healed,
fresh scars
that litter your entire being
the way that Freddy claws
at his victims of sleep.

it is when Sad creeps up upon you
as you listen to your favorite song
and it suffocates you -
suffocates you with your own scarf,
letting you fade in and out of life
as you lose yourself in memories you'd like
to forget.

you know which scarf Sad uses, don't you?
it's the red one, with the black stripes,
the one you threw in the furthest corner of your closet
because it reminds you of that day,
and summer sweat,
and the aching empty feeling that consumed you
until you were swallowed up
completely eaten alive.

Sad is only Sad when it keeps you from precious slumber
and drives you to the brink of drowsiness, all the while
weighing you down with
bone crushing, eye drooping heaviness;
Sad hibernates there, sound asleep behind the cavity in your chest
and it makes you think you're okay again.

the worst kind of Sad
is when it resurfaces -
though only when you're alone -
and replays your entire day,
a constant loop through each dragging second,
until you doubt it ever happened.

the worst kind of Sad
is not Sadness itself;
it is not even the chest clenching feeling
that it brings, forcing you to think
about each breath as you make it
but rather, the worst kind of Sad
is the one that breaks your ribs with the strength
of a wrecking ball
and prematurely reminds you
that someday
they will be gone - for good, forever,
a ghost haunting your life.

the worst kind of Sad is the
inevitable and unalterable reality
that there is nothing you can do
to stop it.

(I bit my tongue a thousand times, but had we reached the thousand and first, I would have told you the truth. Why are we allowed to become close now when you are sure to be gone before I can blink my eyes and gather the courage to say goodbye?)

-a.c.