you are like:



                    a mirrored lake, everything below the surface.

           handwritten love letters and bright smiles.

     a quaint cottage surrounded by wilderness.

          the glimmering sand and burning sunsets.



               the whole night sky and everything beyond it.

          the force in the tide, the chill in the breeze.

     lingering glances and long drives.

lightning and thunder -

                                                -and everything-

                                                                                                      -in between.

I hope you don't mind,
This only almost rhymes –
These things I meant to say –
It's more fitting this way.
We were never in sync,
On two different wavelengths.

But I held back so much,
Briefly felt and left untouched:
Like how you made me feel
Like lowering my shield
And laying my heart bare
To entrust in your care.

But they rapidly passed;
Those warm feelings fled fast,
For you chased them away –
It would have just delayed
The inevitable pain,
Ignited more destructive flames.

Still, I got burned away
Despite what I didn't say.

I don't know how long I can pretend that I'm not rotting from the inside out.

I use a giant silver spoon to carve it out, pretend its ice cream, pretend its happiness, pretend its temporary. Every time I scoop, I'm closer to the bottom of the pint; but what's there at the bottom?

I look fine in your periphery, so what's there to worry?

I'm not bad at pretending, I'm just bad at being un-ugly.

I search for: your smile across the room, the furrow in your brows when you concentrate, your reassuring words of wisdom.
Is it wrong that I want to tell you all my deepest darkest secrets?

I long for: you touch below the table, your hands on mine in secret, your head on my shoulder.
Is it wrong that I want it to be something more?

I dream of: your eyes looking into mine, the way you run your hands through your hair, your chuckle in between jokes.
Is it wrong that all I want to do is feel your lips on mine?

I love: the way you drink your tea, how you are so incredibly kind to everyone, and you, you, you.
Is it wrong that I love you?

I've been told so many times that life's going to get better so I'm at a point that I'm not willing to accept that it won't. Life needs to stop treating me like ****. I don't care what it throws at me, I'm going to try to love every pebble, rock, and boulder. I'm going to be better and I'm going to do better even if I die trying. I'm going to ******* make it. I am going to be kind and giving and loving to everyone I see, even if they're awful to me. It's going to be a giant ******* to life. I'm going to fight for happiness.

Come whisper your method of writing to me, how you unleash beauty from plain words. I know much about silence but nothing to your extent. Come tell me how you made yourself small – how you perfected the art of being a literal void to avoid those who wrong you. Disappearing.
                    – You've never fully disappeared from my sight though.

When I was raised to sew my mouth shut, to apologize for saying too much, I let the elders cut my tongue. After a while, I told myself 'no, no more'. I took back what they took. And that's when I met you.
                    – You did nothing but encourage and let me be who I thought I was supposed to be.

Come whisper why you feel so small, to me, you took up more space than my own sanity. Silence to me is not unfamiliar, I write ugliness whilst being surrounded by it. I am unsilent about many things, like how exploding art into a dull life can save it from fading.
                    – Why do I get the feeling that when you let too much art seep into your life, you vanish a bit more than you intend to?

I hope you never fully dissipate because you spew art into my dreary life, and as selfish as that may sound, it gives me a chance to maybe stop you from fully ceasing to exist. I hope you continue to release your anger and sadness and happiness through your artistry, even if it pushes you back into the abyss. Because you taught me to not care, you told me to just write.
                   – I will fill pages with only semi-colons.

You taught me that we should make poetry, make paintings, make music; make art.
Where emptiness lies, I've learned to use art to fill it up.

There isn't a manual for this.

The world came together the moment we kissed. We stopped and unwound time through the whorls of our fingertips. I still remember the way I stole glimpses of your eyes between moments of flashing lights. Not actually listening to whatever song was playing but instead, cherishing the feeling of the deep bass in the hollow of my chest and the caress of your hands on the back of my neck. I wonder if you tuned out the moment the way I did. It makes me wonder where the wind goes when it gets knocked out of a person; does it go find its way to another and replace the feeling of emptiness in them? That'd be nice.

I knew in between the movements of our lips that I'd never fully get over you because no matter how much I convince myself that there is something or someone new waiting for me where I am right now, there are people we never get off of us no matter how much we try to scrub the memory of them off our broken skin.

It's not that I actively want to **** myself but it would be quite easy to just... jump off the top floor of a high-rise building. Feeling the breeze push against your skin and your hair going everywhere, what a feeling that would be. If you try hard enough you could probably hear the bustle of the city under the harsh sounds of the wind. I bet it'd be really loud. Not sure about how I feel about having people scraping my insides off the ***** pavement though. The point is, I'm not so tired of being alive that I can't even find a quick moment to enjoy a second of ****** television but I also am not bothered to try. Sometimes I imagine how it would be to just stop existing, does that make sense? That's when I think about jumping off high-rise buildings. Whenever I'm up there it's like I can see the world for what it is and I feel almost in control. I want to take that feeling and hold it close to my heart, and use it on bad days to make myself feel better but instead, I keep being the person that I am. Someone I really just can't stand or recognize anymore. I don't know. I haven't been up on any high-rise buildings recently. I am trying to keep myself in check, and I think that's what counts.

I always make things harder than it needs to be, I run in circles and complain when I'm dizzy, walk up a steeper route only to slide all the way down to the bottom, push everyone far enough for them to leave then say I'm lonely. It's funny what I can ruin – everything.

I'm like a chemical, the only one known to corrode friendships and rust nothing but itself. Not approved by the FDA and definitely not fit for human consumption. I reek of such acidity that I hurt fragile corneas and sting delicate noses. It's kind of ironic because I'm supposed to only react with this peculiar clear liquid called self-sabotage and only that, but somehow I have managed to slip and ruin everything that comes in contact with me.

Maybe one day I'll find someone that doesn't mind damaged corneas and sharp smells up their nose. Maybe one day I myself won't mind it.

I really thought things were going well for me. For a solid second, I felt sunshine creep through the thickets. Turns out everything was that shade of green I really liked, not bleak black darkness. It felt kinda warm for a moment, not gonna lie. But when I turned around you burned me. I don't know why I thought that was surprising. My skin was sizzling and peeling and after awhile, all I could see was patterned scabbing lit by that sunshine. I wasn't sure if I was laughing or crying.

I don't think I actually know what I look like.

I feel like pieces of me are these really ugly misshapen puzzle pieces I stitch together to make a cubist painting of what I could be. The mirror sometimes shows me a girl that's worth something but in pictures, I see a pair of arms, legs, eyes, ears, a nose, a body. Someone's body. Out of 380 photos I take, maybe there's one good picture, but that one picture usually doesn't even look like what I think I look like. Is that weird? Once in a while I catch a glimpse of myself and get a little startled because I don't look like what I thought I did... but then that moment passes and I turn back into the puzzle pieces that don't make sense, even to me. I then return to the cycle of piecing them together again, trying to figure out what the hell I actually look like.