On days where your bones are heavy
and your hands stay cold,

On days where your brain is overcrowded static
and your heart is sand and dust,

Remember that there is a warm bed
to welcome you home,
and music to soothe the unplaceable ache.

The moon leaves the landscape
bleached bone-pale, the trees
on the horizon, an interlocking skeleton.

You stand, a ghostly figure with
glass bones and paper skin, face
turned up to the moonlight.

A breeze that whispers of the dawn
blows right through you but elicits
shivers on my skin.

The night is quiet by your command⁠—
when I ask if you are real your
eyes contain oceans, and your voice is
birdsong.

Our bodies are not temples,
I will not be invaded as such.
We are ecosystems.
Made of grit, blood, and change.
Packed with multitudes of intricacy,
We love like gushing streams.
Wound like thorned bush.
Hurt by humanity like hunted prey.
As we burn, as we are cut down,
As we are wounded, crippled, abused,
We still grow.

It's funny to think
that I spent so much
time crying over you.

Until the embers faded—
suffocated slowly from
lack of air instead of
stomped out as I told
you.

We sit at either end
of ashes now when you
have the time.

While I wait,
sometimes I swear I
can see my reflection
in them, showing
me a person that I
barely remember being.

They say the phoenix is reborn
from ash and fire, but I shed my plumage completely.

Her whisper is the Lucifer,
because when she calls I  must answer.

(Holding on is too hard to bear
when her voice feels like satin on my skin.)

I go to her,
because I am only human—
but she is something more.

It’s on nights like these I know you still live on my shelves.
These words hurt to write because they don’t fit into the story that I want to have, in which I’m over you and am changing into someone better than before.

Nights like these remind me that I still love you,
that I still try and push my way towards you.
Try to push into your heart, and into your hands.

These nights remind me that I still want to hold you,
that I still want to lose my voice playing Mario Kart and fall asleep next to you.

I destroyed all I have of you,
and you’re sticking around, like the glue of stickers on the windows of a car.
Thinking of you on these nights makes my throat close and my heart hurt,
it makes my hands reluctant to write these words. I don’t want to look back in the morning and see proof of my weakness compared to you.

I think I once called you a flower, pushing through the crust of the Earth to bloom.
I still see this flower behind closed eyes when I dream, as much as I don’t want to.

The last thing I want to do is push you away,
as much as it’s the only thing I want, to keep you from stomping on me even further.
How do I keep you close to me with all the distance between us?

Do you know what you’re doing to me still?
Every laugh and smile is like salt in the wound, but it’s like I’m starving for your company.

I hate nights like these
because I remember the way your hands shook that day, but also the way you didn’t cry.

I hate nights like these
because you push my mind in so many different directions that I can’t recognize myself in the mirror in the morning.

Most of all, nights like these remind me that you aren’t feeling this.
This heaviness that comes in the dark, inescapable.
I can't see it in your eyes.

Fancy words can't disguise it,
love is *******.

A lie to hide behind
that leaves the world covered in ashes.

I hope one of us chokes,
so you know what pain I'm in,
so I know yours.

Do I know you?
I loved you, held you
but you were a stranger in the end.

The fairytales were wrong,
and I was an idiot,
to believe that you could be mine,
without the rest of the world wanting in.