kissing in the driveway,
grabbing his winter jacket in your fist,
his hand inside your thigh
fake-familiar
it’s not as good as you want it to be
and it isn’t with the boy you want it to be
but it’ll do, it’ll work, it’ll make you feel
good and numb
and wanted,
which is all you need;
the magic recipe of forgetting

You thought that you could break me
You thought that I would fall
You thought that I'd be lonely
but it's not that way at all

Yes, you broke my heart
It's in pieces I'll admit
but I'll put it back together
bit by tiny bit

It's true that I loved you
It's true that my heart aches
but you'll get nothing more from me
There's nothing left to take

I did every thing I could
to show you how I felt
You did nothing but to show me
the losing hand that I was dealt

Such twisted lies you told
No real reason why
I'm putting you behind me
Time to say goodbye

Darling,
asking me to explain why I love you
is like asking me to describe the color red...
Because no one can quite articulate
and it has never,
ever
been said.
You still say.
Every day.
"If you truly love me darling,
describe the color red."

I think the moments I feel most alone are within the first few hours of his departure.
The house filthy scattered with the whirlwind of our being
The smell of him lingering in my bed
The feeling of his lips still on mine
The memory of his laugh bouncing around my mind
Those moments directly after feeling whole
After feeling the intensity of his presence
The silence is almost deafening
The vast emptiness left in his wake rocks me to my core

Silence
I'm so desperate to fill the room with noise
To destroy the silence
Music
TV
Running water
Anything to not feel the crushing weight of it all
Nothing touches it
Nothing cracks
I'm alone

I remember thinking it made you weak to regard someone the way I do him
To be surrounded by people and yet feel alone without him
To desperately count the day until I see him again
The way I pathetically wait on his response to inane questions
Wondering if his soul aches for mine, if he feels the way I do
In the end it doesn't matter if he feels exactly the way I do
I am whole with him

Love always presents with uncertainty, fragility, and a touch of modesty
The knowledge of fleeting love keeps you uncertain
The ending of other relationships reminds you of its fragility
The urge to protect your pride keeps you modest, afraid to boast
This is not love, its more
It is being complete
It is friendship
It is trust
It is us.

Today, I looked in the mirror and I noticed that my left collarbone pokes out more than my right. I noticed that one of my eyes is a deeper green that the other, and that one of my arms is just a smidgen longer. In the garden, I noticed that no two roses have the same amount of petals, no two blades of grass are the same height and no two trees have the same number of leaves. See, it got me thinking about you and I. It got me thinking about how neither of us said "I love you more." We rarely said "I love you too." It was always just "I love you." And it got me thinking that if no two roses, if no two trees, if no two arms on the same human body are the same, then maybe my "I love you" was different to yours. I know that when I told you I loved you, I meant I loved you. I loved every part of you, every nook and every cranny of your body, every inch of your mind and every skeleton in your wardrobe. ****, there are so many skeletons. And maybe when you said "I love you" to me, you only meant that you loved the better sides of me. The smiles and the funny hair colours and the softer parts, or the parts that turned you on and touched your whole body until you were shaking underneath me. The parts of me that are whole. Maybe you didn't love my empty spaces. And maybe love is always different, maybe you'll never love me the way I loved you but maybe it's too ******* late for you to try.

One. No matter how much you scrub at yourself in the shower, you will never wash the feeling of his hands from your skin. You will learn to be okay.
Two. His lips tasted like strawberries and you'll never be able to eat them again without tasting something sour.
Three. Getting under someone else won't fix your problems, but it will help you forget.
Four. Hearing her name will spark a fire so intense in your chest that you'll think all of the flowers have been burnt, but I promise you they will grow back.
Four. It will pass.
Five. He'll never get tired of the way your body feels underneath his.
Six. Let him miss you.
Seven. Let him be angry that he lost you.
Eight. Let him hurt.
Nine. Burn his t-shirt. Burn his boxers. Burn the love notes. Burn everything and let the ashes be the last of him.
Ten. He'll get bored of her too. Don't let him crawl back to your bed.
Eleven. You'll let his empty coffee cup fall to the floor and you'll let it smash and then you'll cry as you pick up the pieces and you'll write a dumb poem about how your heart was his mug and he let it smash and then you will delete it and then you will heal. It will be okay. You will make it.
Twelve. Your first heartbreak will never prepare you for your second love.

I'm six years old. I'm six years old and my favourite colour is green because it's the colour of my eyes and I think my eyes are the prettiest things I have ever seen.

I'm eight years old. I'm eight years old and I had a nightmare so bad I felt like my eyes were deceiving me. My favourite colour is now the same pale blue as my Mum's floral bedsheets because they make me feel safe.

I'm ten years old now. I'm ten years old and I'm a big girl because I'm allowed to walk to school with my friend instead of my Mum. We walk past fields of buttercups and other pretty flowers but my new favourite colour is the peach of the rose in my front garden.

I'm twelve years old. I'm twelve years old and I can't stand the colour green anymore because the meaner people in my school decided my self worth was less important than their jokes. I don't have a favourite colour anymore, but if you ask I'll say it's purple.

I'm fourteen years old. I'm fourteen which means I've been a teenager for a year and I still can't stand the colour green. My Mum let me dye my hair for the first time and now it is red and red is my favourite colour, but if you asked I would still tell you it's purple.

I'm sixteen now. I'm sixteen and I think I know everything, I met a boy that I like for the first time, my Mum doesn't know, but I think he makes the colour green a bit easier to look at because he told me he loves my eyes and that they are the most beautiful things he has ever seen. He gave me a pair of rose tinted glasses and I'm not quite sure why, but for now my favourite colour is the deep brown of his eyes but if anyone asks, my favourite colour is still purple.

I'm eighteen now. I'm eighteen and I can finally drink without it being illegal, and I have started drinking to forget everything except the colour of my Mum's pale blue floral bedsheets, the peach of the rose in my front garden, the bright red of my hair and the green of my eyes but most of all I'm drinking to forget the purple of the bruises that litter my skin, the purple that I always insisted was my favourite colour for reasons unknown to me.

I should be twenty years old now, and my favourite colour should be the orange of the sunset, the pink of the sunrise or maybe even the yellow of the buttercups in the fields I used to walk past on my way to school, but I did not make it to twenty years old. My favourite colour was never purple and I never asked for my skin to be constantly tainted that way, but you made sure I never healed and now my Mum is laying purple flowers on my grave and she's wishing she fought more to get my favourite colour to be green again like when I was six years old and in love with myself and the world around me, because if I still loved the innocent green then maybe I wouldn't be suffering my greatest nightmare as a child with the only comfort being tucked up in the seemingly endless sea of brown. I always tricked myself and everyone else into thinking things were perfect with rose tinted glasses but the lenses shattered and the last flower you laid on my grave was the peach coloured rose from my front garden, and now the petals have wilted and all of the colour has been drained from me but this new world has more hues than I could have ever dreamed of.