why?

brown-eyed boy has given up on me.
i am not enough for a future professor, a future professor
myself. my heart bleeds out over him, but he couldn't give less of a
****, the ****.

but i'm through with it.
i'm learning how to love myself through lack of love from another,
because he could never:
sing like i can.
act like i can.
love like i can.
be like i can.

i am in love with a future professor.

i have been through lifetimes of trouble
in the sixteen years i have been graced by
biology. i have learnt the power of words and
what they do to a person. i have spun webs of
silk to protect my soul from everybody around me, so much so
that i fear i may never reach
you.

but, when - if - i do,
i swear to you that i will expand my parameters, that i will
re-***** my barriers and protect you fiercely.
you will be everything to me.
to you, words will not be weapons.
to you, i will dedicate my life, no matter how small
it
may be.

because, after it all, how could i not love you?

i wish that i could
climb into your skin. that would
be all i would need.

ever since i was born, there's been a hole
in my heart. i clumsily blocked it with
cotton wool, pasted it over with
purple-patterned plasters, and
left it to heal.

it never did.
then i met you.

you seem to know everything, to know
far more than i could ever aspire to
about mending hearts. you took out some
disinfectant, wiped away
the peeling violet, picked out
the ***** of snow with wooden tweezers, and
pressed your hands to it.

i don't know how you did it, but
you
knitted
me
back together.
and
even though i still need the occasional push, the
reassurance that your hands will be there when i need them, that
they want to be there,
you fixed me.

thank you.

it startles me how industrial veins creep through the sky and into
sunsets.
it seems rather poignant to think that
sunsets mean the end of days,
but maybe they mean the end of nature.
maybe in a thousand years
humans will be looking out at
glass domes.

maybe the sunset will be constant then.

maybe we will love it.

maybe we will leave it.

for now, i keep my vigil.

it has come to me that i have never truly known anyone.

speech comes through filters,
through carefully constructed creative collisions
and decisions on what words we should allow to
spill through those iron gates we call
lips.

the people i think i know the best -
the boy with crooked glasses who i can burst my heart upon
and trust him to bear the darkness with a cheery grin;
the man with a crooked bow tie who allows me to critique his jokes
as if they were works of art;
the person behind the stained computer screen i now work at
who takes in my streams of consciousness with a mind that
reads painlessly into them but will never quite understand -
are not the people that i know best.

those people are the ones typing at screens like mine;
those whom i have never spoken to and most likely never will;
those who look out at sunsets like the one i see through the library window and think,
'why can't i paint that with words?';
those who understand that words aren't a gateway to a person -
they are a rabbit-hole that hurries you down through analysis and
worry and
mistakes
into

cold hard truth.

and i realise as i sit here -
a battered blue folder and curling textbook piled next to my computer canvas,
a blue backpack deflated on the floor next to me,
freezing from lack of heating and lack of person -
that i do not know anyone better than

you.