Becca Brown

Becca Brown Sep 2017

The familiarity with which your new lover spoke to me had me desperate for air as the two of you, seemingly unaware of the atmosphere, convened before me on my own bed with such affection that I felt physically nauseous. Maybe, you’ll say, it was just the tequila but no. I know the difference between a feeling in my stomach and the extreme discomfort that is heartbreak, only this is different from the heartbreak I used to know.

The last time I met her, this foul beauty sat atop my chest like an elephant and kept me from my life. She whispered sweet “not good enoughs” in my ear all day long and laughed at how pathetic I was all through the night. She was heavy and dark, then, but today she comes to me hand in hand with something altogether new. I don’t quite know yet how to put my finger on it. The best I can do for you is describe this panicky feeling that they give me.

It starts in the pit of my churning stomach, a tingly sensation like how you feel when you’re minutes away from receiving a reward you’ve waited months for, only warped by a second force like thick, sticky fire. I am scared of losing what we had, though I know that it’s already gone. I know you’re already gone. But I’m still holding onto this thing that I poured my time, energy, and soul into because why wouldn’t I? Artists all have one project that they slave over for years with no true reward or outcome. One that haunts them in their dreams at night and invalidates every other success in their career. It is their personal Portrait of Dorian Gray. I’m lucky, though, because I’m a writer not an artist so my Portrait just so happens to be you, Heartbreaker. My cruel mistress sends you to be in many forms but this time you managed to take a part of me home to her.

It’s not that I loved you more than the others. It’s that I believed in you the most. I trusted you the most. I gave you more second chances than I gave myself when I still thought that a victim was all I would ever be and still you hurt me. Every time you proved that you didn’t truly care about me, I saw it as a challenge to prove that maybe over time you could. The feeling grows in my stomach for several minutes before abruptly exploding to fill every part of me with ash, smoke, and rubble. I am a shadow of who I once was and can no longer make sense of the parts. I make wild, unpredictable movements in an attempt to tidy the space but the faster you move through smoke and ash the further it gets away from you.

These are all of the things I think about as your new lover slips on the end of her sentence and looks to you, cheeks flushed, to be reassured. A whole new set of demons come out to play as you reach for her hand and lay your hot lips on her forehead. I realize with a start that she sees you for the new person that you want to be the way I never can because I spent too much energy on someone else. You are for her what I’ve begged of you for years but that is another pain for another day.

Oh, heartbreak! I know your friend. How silly of me to forget a face. Oh, please, tell jealousy…

Tell him nothing. I will pretend he is a stranger so we may get to know each other all over again. He will be my lover, comforting me over my small mistakes, while you watch on and feel nothing. I will rest here in familiar arms for as long as they might have me.

This is a stream of consciousness style piece that I wrote right after a particularly rough night. It's not edited. These are my thoughts and feelings in their most genuinely raw form. Another version may come later

#heartbreak #love #sad #jealousy #relationship #breakup #stranger #boyfriend #ex

Becca Brown Sep 2014

raw

i thought once that Hell was a pain i could
face for you
for you

For you, I will leave it behind.

to step out of the fire and into the black nothing
nothing

Nothing is all that is left of
us
me

left of it

Becca Brown Jan 2014

this hell we've built

I am no longer searching for the end of the rainbow.
I'm not looking for a treasure chest, no Prince Charming, not some perfect fairy tale ending.
I am looking for
a war.
I want to see the world up in flames,
brothers fighting with bloodthirsty vengeance,
mothers who no longer care how many children they lose.
I am looking for an end
to this
catastrophic,
idiotic,
symbiotic,
toxic love affair.
Because you reek of tragedy and I of sin
and who is to say that love won't win?
I want full blown destruction,
large-scale nuclear fallout,
death by the billions.
I want to see the pain of this thing
in your eyes,
in my smile,
plastered to our hearts.
Because isn't that how we started?
Isn't that how this was born?
A bond conceived through peril and limitations,
too-high expectations and poor communication.
We can move on.
We can start again.
But, by the desolate sky and His backstabbing God,
we know to taste the sweetness of peace on the ever-blowing wind,
we must march through battlefields we have yet only dreamed of.
So, no.
I am not looking for Picture Perfect.
I'm not striving for marriage-babies-happy ending.
I'm looking forward to visiting Hell,
to building a city of misfortune and terror,
to dooming myself to live out most of my days in agony.
It is the only way to you.

i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i write too much about the same person ugh

Becca Brown Jan 2014

attention *****

i hate myself because i go out of my way to get attention and pity
sometimes it's hard for me to understand why
but then i walk into a house
where the people who are guaranteed to love me forever
unconditionally and without restraint
ignore me,
taunt me,
would rather me disappear than exist in their explosive prison
and i know i'm better off on the outside,
when i can get out of here, things will be okay,
but to be cast off every day,
to be ignored and shut off and secluded
from the only family i'm supposed to be guaranteed?
well that ******* hurts
and so i guess i'm not looking for attention
so much as proof
that someone out there really does care
someone in the world can see me.
i look for it in ****** ways, i know
but **** if i don't have a reason to be an attention *****

Becca Brown Jan 2014

Love I've Known

I have known love in intense volumes, but never have I known love with the same sickness which shrouded mine for you. Never have I looked at someone with such simultaneous loathing and adoration. Never have I wanted so much to be near someone, just as I find myself wishing I will never see them again.

And I have known love for an army of men. I have known love for the chilling sea, for the delicate beauties of life and love for the light of human souls. But never have I known a love like this and forever you will be my strongest weakness, my only weakness. You are like the lamp of a genie that traps me, holds me to this earth. To you I must always return, but to me your arms will always be barred.

And we sit across this room from one another, pretending to be friends, but we both know that we will never feel, never see, never breathe with such raw, burning clarity of passion as we did with one another and I catch your eye and lay my hand on your knee out of habit and your breath catches in confusion and I remember my place. I am not sitting on your lap and playing with your hair and cooing sweet things at you. I'm sitting across a room from you, and your ocean eyes wash waves of thought onto the muddy banks of mine and I feel your thoughts in my heart and I miss having the right to hold onto them. I miss the weight of them on my shoulder and the rip rip ripping of them into my soul and the way I sank further into the ground with each one I held.

I watch you leave when it's time to go and remember that just the other day you held me and played with my hair and how I long to be in that moment again and I use the memory to anchor me to my spot on the ground and try to seem weightless as I struggle against every raging fiber in my being to run after you and kiss you and tell you I want you. Only you. For the rest of my life.

When I'm alone in the dark I will try and remember that you don't, will never care about me as much as I care about you and you will always try to make me jealous and with you I will always feel second best, fourth best, twenty-sixth best, first worst.

And they say it'll take a year to get over you because a year we were together but if the year felt like eternity, then will I be doomed to walk this line blindly for eternity and long for you evermore?

Everyone wants to know why I don't try harder to get over you, but I always thought it was obvious that in love with you is the best place in the world and I will never care how close you are, so long as my love for you is the heaviest burden I carry.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that

I still smile when I hear your name.

I still get butterflies in my tummy when I know I'm going to see you.

My heart still breaks when I hear that song, when I think of the times you seemed to really truly love me, when I dare to believe that you might still hold me close to your heart.

And, if you should ask, I would dive back into us without reservations and against my better judgment, for I have never known a love so worth enduring.

i will forever be writing about the same boy, but as long as he keeps inspiring me i guess i'll take it.

Becca Brown Jan 2014

What A Girl Wants

I want you. I want your hand in mine. I want your smile to be my fault. I want to hear you say my name again without reservation, knowing that there's a string tied to the end of it that begins in my heart and I want. I want to look into those eyes again for as long as I want without someone getting suspicious. Without you getting suspicious. And I want to call you up in the middle of the night, bawling because I had a dream that we broke up and feel your arms around me even though you're not there. I want to call you Baby and know that I'm the only one. I want. I want. I want

You will never look at me the same way. You will never love me like I want you to love me. And I fear, I fear, I fear that these things are truer than the air I breathe but God, I have enough hope in me to slaughter and Japanese army, and we both know that hope kills and her only enemy is emptiness but God, who would want that?

So I hope. I hope, I hope, I hope you might feel even a microscopic but of what I do for you. I hope you love me still so I can stop praying to a God I know deep down I will never really believe in. I hope you say yes. I hope you never tell me no again. I hope. I hope I don't cry over you again, but for you. With you, even. But I hope you never need to cry again. I hope you stop seeing me as a child. I hope you learn that I am not innately independent, never was, never will be. I hope you take my weaknesses in stride and stop being repelled by them. I hope you let me learn to expect less from you, because I can do that if it means that I get to see

You are my best friend. I see you, holding my hand and telling me about your day and telling me that you miss me instead of just thinking it. I see you shutting me out and apologizing later and I see your apology from several weeks ago and know it was sincere. I see, I see, I see a future because I know you think the world of me. Always have. I know

You wear your heart on your sleeve. You make your emotions readily available to the public because you don't have time for games, and so I know. I know you think more highly of me than I could ever ask. I know you think I'm annoying, but you only tell me so because you like to comfort me and sometimes you have to injure me first because no one else will ever hurt me the way you can, and I know a lot of what I know is *******. I know you would correct me if you could read this and I know you just tolerate me but I believe. God, I believe in you and I believe

You do it because you still hold me tightly against your heart, but not in. Never in. I believe that in this state that is just too much for you and I get it. I get it. I'm sorry.

I get chills when you touch my hand, and I get shocks when you catch my eye and I get a fire in my belly when we hug and a fuzzy feeling when you play with my hair. I get butterflies in my tummy when you look down at me and I at you and we almost go in for a kiss and the whole room catches its breath and stops to stare because they can feel it too, and I feel it in my heart when someone says,

"You guys just looked like you were made for each other. Like. Physically."

When someone says, "What? What happened to my babies?"

When someone cries when you tell them we broke up because we were their picture perfect love.

When they listen at the edge of their seat to the story of our last couple of years and keep asking, "Okay, but when did you guys get back together?"

When you call me up because our old song played on the radio and it reminded you of me.

When you say...

Well, when you say anything at all.

That's when I feel it. I love you. I love you in a way incomprehensible to even me and I love you in a way that, to try to put it into words would be ten thousand times a disservice, and I love you the way I love that time of day when the sun touches her Earthen kingdom with warm, golden light and makes the world seem whole again. I love you the way I love the feeling of freedom in dreaming. I love you with the intensity with which a small, broken child loves to wish on the stars.

And I want, I want, I want, to know you love me too.

Becca Brown Jan 2013

hands

Eager hands reach out,
brush the starlight
with the tips on their fingers.
They are young,
these hands,
and have only just begun to experience the world.

They have touched slick grass,
plush carpet,
the grimy windows of a city bus.
In their time, these hands
will touch many things.

They will touch beautiful, extraordinary things
just as they will touch evil, corrupt things.
They will touch smiles and they will touch tears.
They will grasp at vanishing smoke,
sink into gooey dough,
and scrape against unforgiving asphalt.

These hands will be taught to love.
They will be taught to learn, to laugh,
to carry, and to mend.
They will be taught to break, to hurt,
to insult and to ****.

And one day
someone will take a grisly, rotting rope
and try to bind them
when they see what I can do.
When they realize where
these hands can take me.

I swear to fight for them
And break the knot
because no matter what I use them for,
they are mine and mine alone.

I know that they can start wars
or smother conflict.
I know that they can find beauty
and turn it into art,
or find struggle and turn it into hate.

These hands are infinite
in their power
and I will never get another set
so whatever I choose to do with them
I hope that it will be
big.
I hope that they will change something
and I hope that they
will do it well.

Eager hands reach out,
Close around the wisps of dreams
With worried fists.
They are old,
These hands,
And have already begun to shape the world.