so it would seem that we have both been yearning, the eager entanglement of our loose limbs leaves me just a little drunk, forgive me for my clumsy fingers & breathless gasps.  i am dizzy with the weight of your lips, kissing me tongue-deep, awash in your scent & splendor.  i cannot get enough of you, now that you dared tell me you loved me beneath the starry-eyed blanket of nightfall, clasped in your radiant warmth & body heat, while the wild things sang.  here, intertwined within a mess of quilts, we are learning each other’s flawed perfection.  i do not apologize for my soft stomach or the sea of scars laddering my legs, & you breathe that i am beautiful.  there is no cocktail of chemicals beating through my blood tonight, only the weight of your body on my body & the poetry of us.

darling, there will be days when our cheeks are slicked wet from the rainstorms within our hearts, when i will be rendered unable to disengage from the safety of my blankets, when i will ask for you to hold me until i no longer feel as if i am breaking.  there will be nights when i smoke countless cigarettes until my throat is ragged & it is easier not to speak, when i will not allow myself to eat because i believe i do not deserve it, when i will call long after you have fallen to sleep, desperately seeking your voice through the static because i am afraid i will forget the way it resonates in my eardrums.

but even this certain pain, my love, my own one, will make us better.  you will see me destroyed & vulnerable, flawed with need.  we will strip each other bare to our truest of selves & fall in love with that sheer beauty beneath.  i give you my undying adoration, the ever-present reaching of my arms, my boundless, uncontained love.  

you are the spark of stars illuminating my night sky, you are coursing with urgency through my bloodstream, you are everywhere & our time is now.  i will love you fragile.  i will love you strong.  
oh darling, i will kiss your fingertips each & every night before together we dream.

some nights, i dream of waking in a cocoon of your sleeping warmth, our listless bodies becoming a hymnal of limbs.  & this is heresy when i want nothing more than to need nothing.  i tried not to adhere to you like breath to a winter morning, but my heart is a betrayal.  we could be a never-ending symphony of skin & sweat & sunshine , the look of you is a country i would like to someday visit.  you are lightning storms in my synapses, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in your wake, the pieces of you i will never erase.  you are everywhere & this is significant enough for me to imagine endless mornings more tangible than any dreamland, or even just one, just to learn if you too taste like yearning.

i wrote you a relentless slew of love letters and gave you all my artwork.  you left them all scattered haphazardly throughout your room, never once bothering to keep them safe.  you never valued anything i gave to you, even in knowing they were all extensions of my tumultuous, uncontainable love for you.  i stopped giving you those things made of my love because you tread thoughtlessly upon them with your bare feet, underwriting my creations.
2. you said i was worth the work, but you never put it in.  i showed you the trainwreck of scars laddering my skin, the bones protruding from beneath, told you about how i swallowed all those pills wishing for a quick ending, then starved for years because i thought i deserved death slow & painful.  i told you i hated myself.  i told you i felt unlovable.  i cried in front of you, exposed in a splendor of shame & total vulnerability, & all you had in response was an awkward little laugh & “well, you don’t look too skinny” you left for work & i cried my heart out.  i don’t blame you for being foolish & insensitive, but regardless, *******.  
3. when you are high, which is always, you become replaceable with any other body.  you repeat the same stories, tell the same jokes, expect me to find you relentlessly charming. you zone in on youtube videos that are not ******* funny, stop laughing at them, it is all so pointless. you are redolent with intellect wasted away on the drugs, mere chemicals that entertain you far more than i ever did.
4. the moment you took me for granted, i knew i was going to walk away.
5. the night after my sister tried to **** herself, after i sought you out for comfort & all you gave me was apathy, i traced a razor across my skin, contemplating her decision.  i didn’t tell you, but i’m not sorry.
6. you always felt the need to remind me i was free, but i already knew.  i am my own person.  this is something i have always known.  you never had the power to influence the way i lived my life or the people i loved & still love & will always love.  don’t ever think you had that power over me.
7. don’t ever tell me i do not need to change.  there are things i have to fix about myself.  not all of my flaws are beautiful.  do not romanticize me.  do not turn me into some idea you have of me in your head.  i am not a beautiful and heavenly creature, I am a human girl & i have made mistakes.
8. i care about you, but i care about myself more, & this is why i am walking away.
9. the damage is irreparable.  i wasted my time believing you could love me the way i wanted you to, but you can’t & you won’t & that is okay.  i do not resent you for it, but you need to let me go.  i am not your dream girl & you are not for me. do not cling to the illusion of who you think i am.  let me go.
10. i am leaving because this time, i don’t just think i deserve better.  i know.

we waited for nightfall before making love to the moon,
smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the breathless aftermath, a
poetry of flesh on flesh & your bright eyes on mine.  i didn’t apologize for the asymmetry of my ******* or the silver scars laddering my wrists,
the cartography of a suicide left incomplete.  you look at me  like i am something worth loving
& all i need are your grasping palms, your shameless love, your
beautiful heart beating against my chattering bones.  we erupt into a star-stained sky,
explosions of everything trapped within us spinning into the stoic dark.  you infinities of beautiful & i give you my all.

you call me e because i said i liked it; this is something more sacred than any god & ******* if my ******* heart doesn't riot every time your bright eyes trip over mine.  be wild with me, mon chere, be free.  we can capture an entourage of looks in each other’s’ faces with careful photographs, but there’s nothing quite like the topography of your cheekbones between my trembling palms.  your every word falls softly beautiful – did you know that?

we smoke hand-rolled cigarettes just to be awash in the splendor of it all, but i don’t tell you i like to feel the disintegration of my organs in a thick cloud of menthol & formaldehyde.  i don’t tell you i still press fingers to the back of my raw-skinned throat, just to know i haven’t lost the courage.  without new scars healing on my delicate wrists & sweet-sour pills dancing in my blood, i am nothing worth remembering.  every night, i fall asleep with my cat snuggled warm against my clattering bones & measure my stomach with trembling palms, afraid that i have suddenly erupted from my wispy shape into something breathing.  a girl of no substance, dark matter where flesh once lived, hollowed perfection in the stiff arrangement of limbs on a crooked frame.  you kiss my knees goodnight; we don’t mention you are sad again or that i am becoming a skeleton.  your teeth are serrated, sweet against my neck.  your hips are songbirds, dipping into my belly, begging with a lust i can’t feel anymore.  your body is heavy & all i want is sleep, the sweetness of a pillow beneath my icy cheek, the passage of time without the constant obsession over infinite sins.  i never promised you a rose garden, so welcome in the monster.