I can't remember
If I told you I loved you
The first time we had ***
But knowing me,
I probably did
My fingernails digging into your back
Your face in my neck
I most likely whispered it into your ear
Said it softly but loud enough for you to hear
I said I love you
Like it could make you stay
Like it meant mutuality
Thinking that maybe the lack of space between us
Could hypnotize you into believing
That you loved me too
A part of me certain that the air particles
Could somehow sew us together
And that the inevitable reality
Lingering in the background
Could never detach us
Convinced myself
That we were an atom in pure form
Incapable of being split apart when we were this close together

***
Is not synonymous with feeling
I knew this to begin with
Love and lust
Like oil and water
Can be separated with ease
Television and movies
Trained me in the art of one night stands
But I never intended to have you for one night
I didn't wanted you for a week
I wanted you for the amount of time
Where we forget how long it's been
Memorizing every single one our limbs
Ribcage
Arm
Hands
Skin
Then ******* the demons out of each other
To rectify our sins
Making love until we have no recollection
Of who we were before we learned each other's bodies
We were nobody
Before the conquer of this foreign territory
I wanted to surrender
From the moment we touched
But making love is so similar to make believe
That it gets hard
To tell the difference sometimes

When I slept next to you on your couch
My back pressing into the ridged corners of the sharpness
It was not out of convenience
It was out of purpose
Believing that withstanding the ache
Would show you how much I cared
Forgetting that your heart
Belonged to someone with a different name
In different city
Yet every night you still called my body home
Coming back to it repeatedly
Like a drunken wanderer
I thought if you did enough times
You would never want to leave
I convinced myself
That letting you **** me
Was one step closer
To getting you to stay

***
Is not synonymous with permanence
We should have never done it to begin with
Knowing quite well you were here
With the intention of temporary
I talked myself into your skin
Thought if I wrapped myself in it
Deeply enough
You would do the same
To me
My body
Was nothing more than a grave yard
For you to hide your secrets in
No treasure,
No gold

I buried my love for you
Into the curve
Of your collarbone
I bet it would still be there
If you looked for it
But I know
You wont.

After the heartbreak
You will learn to love again
It may take
Weeks
Months
Or years
But it will happen
After the fall
You will learn to build yourself back up
From the pieces left behind
It may take
Weeks
Months
Or years
But it will happen
After the spillage
Through all of this emptiness
You will be whole again
It may take
Weeks
Months
Even years
But it will happen
Change will happen
Life will happen
And you
Will be you again.

I love you today
Not tomorrow, but today
Because I live in the moment
And the moment is now

I don’t think about tomorrow
Because tomorrow is the future
And you tell me not to worry about that

So I will love you today
With every ounce of my soul

And when tomorrow comes
I will love you again
I will love you differently
I will love you the same
I will love you brand new.

I remember the day he told me.
Driving down Deerfield road he said so casually,
I have cancer.
The word that we’ve been conditioned to fear, the one that we associate with our
world falling apart, the word that we never want to hear come from the mouths of
our loved ones.
But there it was, spoken with such ease, the word released from my fathers
mouth.
I’ve never been good at emotions or feelings or any of these human things that
you're supposed know how to express naturally. So as he told me I just sat there
in silence, the only sound being the soft hum of the highway around us.
And we drove home.
We didn’t really talk about it much, just went through the motions like that was
enough and it was.
The surgery was quick and before we knew it, he was cancer free and i just
assumed that wed go on with our daily lives that easily and for a while we did.
But the book didn’t end there. Like every good story, there’s a central conflict,
one that we avoid or even face but after some time it reappears as if to say, you
thought i'd just go away didn’t you?
and it came back. With a vengeance, one that would not be so easily cured like
before, one that would change my life and force me to confront the feelings from
which id always tried to hide.
And this time when he told me there was no silence and no casual tone in his
words  I could hear the tremble in his voice as he knocked on my door, he never
knocks. And I knew in that moment that something was not in place. And I could
tell from the fear plastered on his face that he was scared. The man I was
looking at appeared as a lost child, not the strong confident man that I call my
father.
And he told me with the fear in his eyes and a tremor in his voice followed by
the sentence,
"We’ve got so much we’ve yet to accomplish."
And I knew, this was just the beginning of a whole another battle.
The chemotherapy took his silver locks but not his spirit, took his weight but
not his soul, it tore and it ate at his body until the man that stood before me
seemed almost unrecognizable but he had made a promise, one that he had no
intention of breaking. So I stood beside him during infusion after transfusion
with a heavy heart and the fear that I could possibly lose him but never once
did I let it show. I held myself strong because he did. I never let myself get
discouraged because if he could be tough, than I could too.
Sitting on my bed one, weak and at his lowest, he told me to start planning. He
said that our lives were only just starting and that this was merely a wakeup
call to start living and that he wouldn’t dare give up because for 17 years he
has been my rock and he would give anything to see me grow up and that he wasn’t
going to take no for an answer that I was going to write our bucket list and
that he was going to beat this cancer.
And he did.
One Sunday in September we went for a drive.
Something that I so often took for granted and now couldn’t be more grateful for.

And with the sun blaring down on us and the clouds filling in the gaps of blue,
I realized that its moments like these that are the ones to cherish.
Its moments like these that define our lives and the casual routine of our being.
So hug your parents a little bit longer, squeeze them a little bit tighter, make use of
the time you have together because you never know when one car ride might change
everything.

It's been so long since I've touched you
So long since i've felt the scratch of the stubble surrounding your lips
The kind that I always complain about
But deep down i think you know how much I adore

It seems like it's been an eternity since I've felt the softness of your skin
The way it streches over your bones so delicately
My fingers repeatedly outlining the indents of your back
Fitting my hands into the deepest curves

My lips have never felt so lonely
Missing the tickle from even the slightest and most gentle brush of yours against them
Forgetting that talking is their main function
Wishing that instead their only job was to love

My legs hang loosely and awkwardly without having yours to intertwine with
And arms rest on each side of my body feeling desperate for companionship

Hands locked into oneanother
So accustomed to holding
Naturally curling inward
Craving the rough callus of your palms


I did not know
That a body could feel nostalgia
But a need for touch proves otherwise.

Buy her flowers
Not as a chore
Not to get on her good side
Not because you have to
Not because it’s what you’re supposed to do

Buy her flowers because
When you saw them in the store
They reminded you of her
And you couldn’t stop thinking about
The beauty they possesed

Buy them because
You live to see her eyes light up
And  the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles
How she turns her head
To hide the blush of her cheeks

Buy her flowers because you want to
Not because she wants you to.

Dear lover
By the time we fall in love i would hope that you will have already learned my name, but just in case you havent i will tell you. My name is danielle lauren shorr. danielle like some ancestor i never met, lauren because my mom liked it, and shorr like the beach. I like the beach. No more like love the beach. Maybe almost as much as i will love you. I like the sand between my toes, the way the wind blows through my hair and makes it an ugly mess, i like the way pigeons search for any trace of food like its all one man for himself and this is the hunger games. I like food. But at first i might be embarrased to eat in front of you, i can attribute this to my history of insecurity and that ******* belief that girls are supposed to order salads on dates. But fear not. Because i hate spinach and fries with extra cheese are my favorite, and soon enough i will learn to embrace it. I will always want to embrace you. To hold you, to be close to you, i have an overwhelming need for touch. But a slight fear of intimacy. I will be afraid at first when you try to get close to me, i will put up my guard and attempt to hide my battle scars and everything i dont want you to know about me yet, ive been hurt before. And i know im not the only one on this earth who has been. But when i tell you that i want to get to know you i am telling you that i want to memorize every part of you like the way i used to stay up at night as a kid memorizing lines of books. I love to read. I love getting lost in the words that someone else wrote that so closely manage to speak to me. I want you to speak to me. When you are struggling or lacking in anyway i will assure you with 100% certainty that things will be okay. I will pull you out of pits of depression with every muscle, bone and limb i have in my body, i have not always been comfortable in my own body. And thats been a cause of my own depression. So when the day comes when i give myself to you, i am hoping that you will remember that every part of me is devoting itself to learning you, i want to learn you. I want to trace the lines of your skin, connect the dots with your freckles or birthmarks, play silly little games and hope you let me win, i will let you in. But only if you let me. And theres parts of me that arent my brightest, i will have days where i will be unable to see anything but darkness, i want you to hold me regardless of what i say, or my stubborness, i am stubborn. I am a taurus. When we fight i will be a bull, strong in my pride and unable to see any other side of the argument, i will tell you this right now: give up. unless its important. I want to feel important. I will want to be included in every part of your existence and when I’m not i will get annoyed and ******* and demand to be the center of your universe. I will act like this because i want to feel like i matter. Like i am matter on this earth so important that if i disappeared even for a mere second the earth would crumble and fall into pieces. And if i crumble and fall to pieces, i only ask one thing of you. Do your best to help me back up, im not asking you to put me back together but to try your best to keep me from breaking even more. And when you break, know that i will be here to comfortyou. To hold you. To tell you that i love you. to make you laugh at the most innapropriate moments about the most innapropriate things, to make life seem a little less painful, and a little more bearable. I will do my best to help you stay your best. And if we end up not working, it will be okay. Because nothing will matter more than the love i gave to you when it was good and if in the end it doesnt go the way we thought it would, well, we'll be okay. But if it does. If this love stays, know that i will love you and give you every single day i have, i will make you remember why you decided to fall in love in the first place, i will make sure to make you feel okay, i will always make sure you're okay. if you're having a bad day, I'll be right there with you. I'll be here now and forever.
Sincerely your future lover.

I once read
That in 7.6 billion years
The sun
Having reached its maximum size
Will shine 3,000 times brighter
Than it does now
I have always wondered
How it is possible
To know such a thing
When 100 years
Is beyond a lifetime
How we could possibly
Look so far into the future
When now seems like an eternity
And tomorrow is miles away
How can we embrace the moment
When we are constantly being told to plan ahead
And what's the point
Of waiting 7.6 billion years
When the sun is already
Shining
And the moon
Already loves her?

19/30
My memories do not corrode
Incapable of being broken down
Sap stuck to the branches of my mind
I remember it all
The first time your fingertips grazed the ridges of my back
How your breath felt speaking silence onto my neck
I remember it all
The nostalgia once sweet to me
Now tastes bitter
I've learned
To swallow it down quickly
In order to
Prevent it from coming back up
My memories are trapped in the lyrics of
Songs we used to play on repeat
Ones that
Used to define the whole moon that we were
That are now
Merely a crescent of what you left me
I am still trying
To figure out who I was
Before I padlocked every door of myself that I once kept wide open
I have learned that
My memories do not rust
So I am still trying to figure out
How we became iron
I am still trying
To figure out
How I could still long for something
That was never truly gold.

To the boys who just want to touch me
You must know that I am not a momentary happiness type of person
Overthinking is my forté
My name is not chastity
Nor is it easy rather
Difficult and complicated
Hard to crack open
There is no sweet center waiting to be divulged
I am more like the sun
A ball of pure fire that burns at the touch
Anxious at the thought of unfamilar palms and fingertips
Meant to be admired from a distance
I will warn you not to get close to me
For magnets swim in my blood
And I cling to no extent
I am
Surrounded by a force field
I do not let down my guard
So if you want to touch me
You must first
Learn to love me.

I have the word jealousy plastered on the walls of my mind
I do not announce it
After all
I am much too proud for that
But I think it
A lot
Run it back and forth through my head like a car on a track
Envious is engrained in my genetic makeup
So I make up reasons why I shouldn't be
Cover myself with thick layers of false confidence
Draped over my insecurity
She
Is prettier than me
She is tall
And
Skinny
Natural blonde hair that falls over her shoulders
Wears her smile like she is just happy to have had woken up this morning
I
Am bitter
Often overthinking the reality that life is
Plagued by my inability to hold onto happiness
Not to mention
Short
And what my mother would call
Curvy
I am not like her
We do not have similarities
The only time she is on her knees is when she is praying
I do not pray
Instead
Beg my sorrows away to alcohol and other unholy sins
I have never been able to believe
In things that cannot be seen
But she
Is different
She on the otherhand
Probably doesn't need to be touched
To believe
That you love her
Your word is probably enough
But see I've learned not to trust
For I have been let down too many times
And I constantly find ways
To build myself back up
So I call her a stripper
Although she is an avid church goer and I myself have never been
I say she dresses too mature
And although she is only a few years younger
I say she is too young for you
To make myself feel better
Let me be the first to admit
I am jealous
I am envious
I am everything that most people would probably never guess
I am all of these things
Not because I want to be her
But because
She probably makes you happier
Than I ever did

There is a little girl
That rests in my bones
Inhabits
My soul
Hides within me
Peaks out through the cracks of my ribcage
And
Every so often
Reminds me
Who I am
I call myself woman
Now and then
Give my body to men
Who promise me fleeting moments of attention
I live in routine
Put on the charade that is adulthood
I almost forget sometimes
That I am not grown
That most of it is false
A cover
I hide under the covers at night
And still fear the dark
Conquer it with a glowing light shaped like a rubber duck
I sleep alone
But the pillow of my late dog besides my head
Keeps me safe
I am a person of habit
Afraid that if I alter the slightest details
More than just the content of my sandwiches will change
Change has never been a close friend of mine
I know him just well enough
To invite him in
But his arrival always seems to come
When I least expect it
I still cry
When I get overwhelmed
And the thought of unfamiliar hands
Makes me shudder
I am still learning
How to trust
When I had always been taught
To not believe everything you are told
I've recently realized
That soon enough
I'll have to confront the reality that is life
So for now
I'm choosing to protect
The little girl within me
Wrap my arms around her innocence
Shelter her from the hurricane like storms
From those who have come to knock her down
I'm choosing
To hold on to her
For my greatest fear of all
Is letting go.

The human body
Regenerates completely new skin cells
Approximately every
27 days
I say this knowing
That I am someone
Your hands have never gotten to know
My skin has mourned the loss of your touch
Grieved for the freckles that never got to know your warmth
No memorization of the path your fingertips took while
Tracing the lines of my skin
I am a whole new person
Since you've last held me
My body
Is not the only thing that has changed
Crazy how
So much can differ
From the last time
You knew me
But today
You don't
It only took 27 days for me to become someone else
I am someone else now
My limbs can attest to that
They no longer crave to be cradled by your arms
You do not know me
And it only took 27 days for me to realize
That I
Never really knew you
At all.