The other day when a good friend asked “what are you looking forward to” I did not have an answer. I realized I hadn’t had an answer to that question since my battle grounds were school rooms and scented pencils wielded at close range. I hadn’t had an answer since I split my last cookie with my best friend, or gleefully accepted an invitation to spend all night on a carpeted floor to wake up to drool on pillows and cinnamon buns made by dad. I don’t remember the last time I had an answer to that question. Not since my imagination was my most prized asset instead of pink pills taken twice a day. With water of course. Not since my fingers typed epics instead of emails. Not yesterday, and definitely not the day before. Though I have more money now than I ever have, I feel poorer than I’ve ever been in a life that pays by the hour and not by the gratification of $10 on book store day. No small thing has chance anymore at making me smile. Life has done a good job at doing away with smiles for grown ups.

Now I smell and I eat whatever Id like and no one is here to tell me to stop making mistakes but I was never ready to hold my own life in the same esteem as anyone prior. I dont know what it takes to stay alive. This is all a pitiful attempt at nurturing animal let go into the wild. The animal bites the hand that feeds but is afraid of the fire. I am but an animal whimpering for someone to hold it. Just once more. I don’t know what Im doing and I fear I won’t, for a long long long, time. I am a grown child who one day was told that smiling was for grown ups do, and I can do it now, but alone. I can do everything I used to, but now just alone. But it turns out I dont want to do anything anymore. Not with myself. Not here. And definitely not forever.

Let me shrink down once more, by grace of time, and feel small again.
I promise it will make me smile.

The nature of yearning is inexplicably human. Animal even. An all consuming urge to digest the entirety of another body. The raw pressure to take and take and take. To gnaw my lips until the blood excites me enough to risk the second serving. I can’t explain why but you feel like god in those moments. When my face is buzzing and hot and just the suggestion of your validation of me is an apple I dare not bite. But I should? Should I? Do you want me to? I’m sick. I’m a sick animal and without need to recover. I’m an animal whose chest is caged in rationale but whose bones crackle and splinter from holding it in. Primitivity still exists in us. It’s just that it happens to exist in the bad ways. The shameful ones. The ones that we sit in pews to forget. But it feels so right for lust to visit when it’s not invited. Come in. Sit down. Consume. Digest. Enjoy me.

Her beat had been so bastardized that a tree had grown to protect it;
To harbor silence in pandemonium.
Isolation was the only remedy to a disease persistent to turn past into present,
So she grew on her own terms, and her heart beat for no one but herself,
Because to let someone in, meant to risk axing away at the barricade she had worked so arduously to withstand.
When she fell into him the first time, the wounds were preemptive.
Her brittle bones cast away at the hopes that he would see her heart before her mind;
From which idiosyncratic branches wrapped around her fingertips,
And the oak shards springing from within, just barely inching away from his own heart.
Strangely enough, he didn’t seem to mind.
When he stripped to bare back the scars were evident,
They cascaded from collarbone to the dip of his hip.
That’s when he brought her closer and whispered marvelously:
“I would bleed again for you.”
At the beginning, the boy hurt,
Yet he still saw the heart it held between the prongs of wooden cage.
So he continued to hurt, for her.
His mission rooted in the purpose of painting her the canvas of what life ought to be.
Penciling in the possibility of a reality where her aching shoulders could be lifted,
And a new smile plastered onto her lifeless frame.
He painted her in the image of who she used to be-
As if he knew her before she grew weary at life’s expense.
In the canvas, the wooden cage had disappeared, and a luminosity introduced itself.
He had uncovered her heart, and no longer was it encompassed by a shell, but freely beating;
Beating for him.
Every morning, day in and day out, meters of her branches gradually retracted,
And the boy’s scars gradually sealed over.
Oddly enough, it seemed as if they had healed each other.
That the quiet embraces they held each night didn’t pierce him,
but rather comforted his mind that this time, it would be different.
Somehow, she would come to love him, and him, her.
She saw in him a soldier; whose battle wounds were ghastly.
He had lived through hell and came back to dispel the stories,
But instead of stories of agony and woe, and anger and spite,
He spoke of the morning dew on dandelions reflecting the sun’s rays and how they most beautifully sprung from nothing.
He spoke of the quiet whispers of the wind bringing music to deaf ears.
He spoke of how if you listen closely, you can almost hear each cricket sing its song
in a field of thousands.  
Each time he kissed her,
he did as if it were the last.
Each time he held her,
he did as if she were asleep.
Each time he healed her wounds,
he did as if they were preemptive.