he's not the forever type of guy. he's the temporary, lovely for awhile kind. the type that takes you to the park and pushes you on the swing. the kind that takes you to look at the stars. or take you out for milkshakes at midnight. the sort of love that grabs you by the hips and teaches you to
dance to hungry eyes
kiss like you've been starving for days
hold hands like your life depends on it
but then he leaves...
"not for good of course!" he assures you.
so you wait. and wait.. and wait...
until one day you find yourself standing at his door.
twirling your hair and brushing down your skirt that is only a few inches to short.and as you ring the bell, you bit your lip the way those little school girls do that didn't learned their lesson the first time. and as he answers the door with that 'too good to be true' smile on his face, he says, "come in. meet my friend. i'm teacher her to dance. remember when i taught you? she likes dancing to hungry eyes too."

you told me stories of love that was unheard of. they were so real i could just about feel your finger tips finding every ridge of my spin. you told me of little castles in france that would some day be ours and how there would be flowers and sunshine and some day everything would be a little bit more alright than it seems now. that was three years ago. and here we are now more ****** up in the head than before and your fingers have found my spin and your lips are on my neck and i'm grabbing you like your the last breath of fresh air. in fact you are the last breath of fresh air. i kiss you and suddenly there are no storms in my head and when i talk to you, you must think i'm on ******* because my pupils are as big as the hole in my chest. but see love, while you were busy filling up my heart with all the love it could never possibly hold, i had thousands of dead bodies to bury in my head and maybe that's why my vision went blurry. i buried Reality and then i couldn't exactly see where i was walking. you took my hand and asked me to dance and you told me that "today we could be who we wanted to be." you said "today is just for you and me."

trace my body with the tips of your fingers but stop at my waistline to make sure it's the right size for you. circle around to my back and run one figure down my exposed spine, kiss my neck and whisper in my ear a quiet mouth full of lies. you'll tell me you love me and that my eyes are the only ones you see, but i'll look at you blank because you're the third guy to tell me that this week and they all leave right? so just slide your index finger down my fragile ribcage and tell me that you'll stay... for now...until the girl i saw you with last night comes back in town. you'll tell me you won't hurt me the way he did, put your hands on my hips, lean down to my left collarbone and sink a kiss. your right hand finds my *** and i try and squirm out of your grip, it's to late, your teeth bite my lip and i feel my heart slip to my gut. don't ruin me, darling.

you all lied when you said it gets better. it doesn't ever get better. we just find new ways to feel less and hurt everyone else more. we find news brands of makeup to make us look more alive then the day before and we find a better way to stitch a smile on our face and hope that this time it'll last a little longer because it's painful having to force your body to adjust to something so unnatural. we find ourselves in a strangers bed to find our passion again for awhile and we watch our fathers hit our mothers so we can learn what love is supposed to look like. you lied. you told me it gets better and it doesn't. we just steal each other's hearts because sometimes, someone else's seems a hell of a lot better than ours for awhile. we smoke until we can't breathe because who the **** likes breathing anyway? we lie to the only people in our lives that we love because sometimes lying makes things easier than seeing the light flicker out of someone's eyes. sometimes watching the melancholy take over someone else when you take to much of them away is to painful for us, and after all, we're all just here trying to survive. taking what we want when we want it. taking smiles when we need them. taking love when we have none. we've found nothing more exquisite than watching a person drop their ego and self esteem for someone who needs it. we find it beautiful to drop a few to many pounds so you look nicer when you straddle him. you're prettier when you have an ***, not because you look better but because that way it gives him something to hold on to when your torn up heart is not enough for him anymore. we hit and scream and bleed because at the end of it all, it doesn't get better. we are all here together. taking what we need from each other and finding a way to call it our own

i am collateral damage. and i think at some point everyone feels it, caught between the crossfire. your house is no longer protected by two parents, but just by one. your friend group no longer consists of a few, because now it's just you. and maybe it always had been, you just didn't realize until the bombs went off in your chest. and when i carved out "sos"  in my wrist i realized that help doesn't always come in time. you see i got caught in the crossfire and i think i only got hit twelve times i can't be sure though. i can't exactly feel a thing anymore; i used to recognize you. i used to be able to come home, but someone shot through the windows so i moved. some people can regognize a home by the way it looks. i think i found you. but how many circles does it take before i give up looking? how long does it take before i'm lost for good?

you held on to him as if he was the last tangible thing, keeping you from falling to hell. you grabbed his hand so tight your knuckles turned white as if he would run away the second you let go. after all, you didn't want to hang more flyers in your chest, begging people to call if they found him. you didn't want to have another funeral for all the memories between you and him. And my god you must have been disappointed when you realized that just like him, the moon follows everyone. he teaches them all to dance to hungry eyes, darling. you let him wring out your ego like a sopping towel and when he didn't come over that night, you misplaced your importance. you overdosed on "i love you" and now your brain is so fried, you forgot that love isn't supposed to make you cry. he was your pair of glasses and you're stumbling without him. life doesn't make sense and you can't seem to get your head to stop hurting from squinting so hard trying to keep the tears from falling the same way your mother's did when she found out you would rather be dead. i wish i could tell you it gets better but you fell and i'm so sorry but paralysis doesn't fix itself baby girl. some things in life are permanent and i'm sorry that the pain he cause you when he forgot to catch you has to be one of them.

my everything. you wrote me a letter and i found it floating in a bottle. i read your poem like it was a taste of a few yesterday you forgot like all of our promises. and when the little girl runs up to me with a seashell begging me to listen for the waves, how do i tell her that the only thing i hear is your absence? how do i tell you that some parts of my life move much slower when you're not in them? how do i tell you that i search for your face in the clouds or that your voicemail is my favorite song? it's been storming for days in my head since you left and for a moment i swear i heard your voice in the wind say:
"my heart will find its way home to you the day the waves quit being faithful to the shore."
i didn't ever crave the beach the way you did, but you know i would have tolerated it to hold your hand. and i always hated how our feet sank to hell when we walked in the sand but you always reminded me that one of us had to break the ice. our feet broke the surface with ever step just the way our parents broke their marriages word by word. and i can't help but see coffins in my fathers eyes every time i mention my mother's name but i won't ever forget the time he prayed to a god he used to think existed, begging for my mother to let him see his children on father's day. you see i read your poem in that bottle that never should have reached me and just as splinters must be pulled out, every memory i have ever had of you should be too. so i will tuck the tattered paper back into that bottle and send it off for the next little girl who stumbles on it so that maybe she will learn before i ever did that love isn't what it's cracked up to be.