there is a taste of home on the tip of my tongue
that is here but also not
a constant state of sugar-coated longing, bitter-trailed meet-ups, sour-filled goodbyes
something i had tasted my entire life yet might never even had
a sense of belonging, somewhere to be safe
a place where it tastes like bittersweet comfort and everything else

when it's time to let go, will you?
cry me a river
curse my name
take back what's yours
fill the blame

when you grow up
five, four years from now
seven, six months older
no need to wonder; never suffer

splitting head; broken bones
one more crush, three more crunch
stolen fingers; freshly sliced flesh
three wounds to bleed, more cuts to heal

you cannot break me
more, or even at all
you have no power
to break what has
already been
broken

maybe
what we long for
is not to die
but instead
to vanish

i wish i could see your grief,
lead them by my own two hands,
then give them a room big enough in
me to fit them and their lingering shadows.

i am a terrible shapeshifter
for no matter how much i shift my shape
i'll always be what i am within
cruel, wicked, broken
worthless

do you think life will ever
give us a chance
or rather
the privilege:
to redeem ourselves,
to forgive our wounds,
to walk toward happiness?

and yet even in the
midst of this chaos
there is a flower
blooming beneath you

i am sorry for
trying to fix you
a shattered heart
not a broken mirror

i am sorry for
trying to complete you
not my other half
for you are already whole

i think i'm so used to feeling things in grand amounts — love, longing, grief, anger — that when it subdues my body recognizes it as numbness and everything turns pointless in seconds matter

i want to close my eyes,
pretend everything was fine,
ends up falling asleep and
waking up in another world
where you don't exist

cut me open
and see my flesh
for it will not heal;
for it cannot heal

as you put
the imperfections of mine
for full display

in another life,
i hope we still find a
way to each other

i hope we would stay
side by side until
the end of forever

in another life,
i hope we were happier
together.

maybe i loved you too much,
too much that it weighs me down,
so much that i fell too hard and forgot how to stand up.

maybe i loved you too soon,
too soon that time would not give us a chance to be with each other,
so soon that we chose to forgot one another.

maybe i loved you too selfishly,
too selfish that i only see you as mine,
so selfish that i forgot you were never so from the very beginning.

maybe i should have loved you just enough, but i did not.

i ended up loving you so much;
i ended up loving you too much.

your sorry
meant nothing
and so was mine;

we scrape each
other's skin only
to find another
layer of lies