To the girl who empowers me,
With a laugh, a glance, an honest word,
an unprompted touch of my shoulder,
to do the things I otherwise wouldn’t bother to:

Never have I been so brave as to hold a ball python for my own fun til she spoke of a snake who’s half her height
like an old friend.
That is not a metaphor.
Or to do that one pull-up more
and maybe one after it,
if there’s even a chance it’d bring me a step closer
to being the person I know I want to be.
And I’m definitely not yet a person who’s built for pullups,
but with her looking my way, doubt seems like a foreign word.

She told me she wished
that she could someday be the subject of my writing,
yet it seems every time I try to prove
that love is action,
passion eclipses intellect,
my paper folds itself into an airplane and flies by its own accord,
and I’ll be ****** if,
of all the things I can’t control,
my own words will be one of them.

I know I severed us for a while,
tugged too ******* the Jacob’s ladder between her fingers,
wanting more in the moment than she had to spare,
til her eventual reply was noble truth:
that her hands wouldn't be vacant for holding
while she had so much to set them to work on.

Her hands, her beautiful hands, were booked,
sometimes literally,
with her thousand different interests and commitments,
and all I could do was lay in bed at night,
sometimes tossing and turning at the thought of the time
where she took me in her arms on a whim,
and I was unable to fall asleep
for fear that, if she permeated the film of my dreams,
she'd be more nightmare than not.
Yet with time, she spoke to me by her own inclination.
Whistled to me like the stray dog I'd made of myself
and lay out a spot to sit next to her.

I never realized until now how much I respect her
for never playing nice with the boy who,
assuming we’re friends enough,
calls me a useless lesbian.
I guess that pound of a joke had some ounce of truth to it,
for all the times where what she and I had
felt like one great web of miscommunications,
and subconsciously I see her as the spider
or she sees me
or sometimes it’s us both this whole time.
But if there's any certainty in it all, it's this:
She'd been in at least the back of my mind
for as long as I'd known her,
asserted herself right away
as the kingpin of my flighty wits.
And I still dream of writing something that makes her heart beat,
even halfway to on par with all the stories that race
through her head,
in her wild blood.
I wanted to be her latest passion for even a moment.
Because the honest to god gleam in her eyes
when she tells me what’s really on her mind
made me so selfish as to want to be that thing,
for however long
or not-long
it could last.

Yet I've sometimes seen that fervor in her eyes waver,
like they're trying to promise something better.
Little does she know
she's already the best thing for me
just by being herself.

And I understand that she doesn’t love me
not in the way I once wanted,
but having her for however long in my life,
before she’s off like a free willed honeybee
with so much better to do,
that is enough and so much more.

Because despite how I’ve tried to deny the facts of the matter,
I’m firmly rooted for a girl who's bold enough
to crack the whip over my head if I ever went to war with myself.
A confidant that won't run,
won't offer half truth when the whole of it
is all that actually matters.

This was that paper airplane
comprised of eight months of the cheapest blood, sweat, and tears
from the first moment she set up camp
in the farthest reaches of my heart,
to where I was finally past the point of dreaming
of any future
where she may not be as happy with me as I am with her.

For better or for worse,
I've straightened my spine and let the honest truth sail
knowing full well that she doesn’t owe me a thing.
I'm still not sure if I was coming clean
or stating what’d always been obvious,
when I wished for her peace
among these watercolor depictions,
for her to find the rest she so craved and deserves,
and to wake, inspired anew, in a cycle that suited her,
whether I was a part of that cycle or not.

To the girl who helped me find the gall,
and who's going, going,
gone on to better things:
Gabriel García Márquez says I love you with all my being,
so maybe that’s why I'm finally letting you go.

When it seems all the world wants to sell me on painkillers, you face the troubled of all sorts with a scalpel and a wink. Even when those stitches holding your own spitshined heart together are looking a little iffy.

Since childhood, we’ve floundered like fish out of water both longing for the sea, but with age, I think that you and I have come to view the ocean in very different ways.

What I see as an adventure, you’ve always seen as home.

The sea could never quite mystify someone who’s strived to be more siren than human. No, unlike the flower from which you were named, your real garden patch is present with the planets.

You make me want to be as stalwart as Stonewall, and save my wishing well quarters for the pigs who tried to suss out every non-straight playing broad through her suit clothes, so that on the days where the face of my best friend's assaulter bears down like the man in the moon, she’ll preserve her beautiful, blessed hands by halting her fist before it can hit any wall.

Apparently, you’ve been learning Russian on a whim since age eleven. You love tattoos and art in it's sometimes most tantric forms. The firm and sometimes too-firm handshake between aesthetic and soul, and what, дорогая сестра, is more human than that?

And you called yourself cynical.
Yet when the life of a honeybee means so much in your hands, I can’t understand how you tried to scorn the weight of the world. You found beauty in banana slugs, and I have to believe you do not know your own self.

Seeing you make sense of other people, I now believe that mermaids are incredibly self-conscious, so when we asail our Somali plundered doubloons, blood diamonds, pearls of tortured oysters, and other ill-gotten goods back into the sea, may we feel we’ve done our duty when they see their own reflections for the first time and become narcissists.

Because of you, I tried for the first time to love myself, because like it or not, this is what I’ve got. What we’ve got. The most detached tag team duo the world’s never seen.

But on the day that I finally throw the dragon’s den fortune of our mother back into the mariana trench from which she and the sessions family came, I’ll think back to the time where she said that, as siblings, we’d grow up to be best friends. But let’s face it, we have both lost a lot of best friends, though you are the only one of all those come and gone who’s yet to steer me wrong. Okay, that’s a fat lie, because for a second of my life you convinced me to believe that you are cynical.

Comparing your stride to the rest of the world’s, I will never again judge somebody for the way they walk. Even if they have to drag themselves, kicking and screaming from point A to point B, the last thing a person needs is another stranger stepping on their lifeline.

I hear of everything you're doing, day in and day out, think of all the times this world’s nearly lost you, and I remember the statue in our neighbor’s front lawn. A little girl-an angel- with butterflies landing atop her precious hands. Then I realized that to be an angel statue means you can never reach out for more, and suddenly, I know why you always preferred cyborgs.

Alongside the girl who's a home where the heart is and a rooftop escapade all in one, I learned while wandering like a stray dog through a French chateau that old folktales believed salamanders were born of fire.

I’ve always felt as if fire is a cliche. It bites the hand that feeds it. Beautiful, but destroys. We’ve heard it before.

But, no one strives to be a cliche, and no one would like to be born of fire, either.

Too often, when we hack the head from the hydra of our family roots, another tragedy grows in its place. A salamander might have poison in its blood, and bloodline, ‘cause this family tree was uprooted long before I’ve ever seen it in its prime.

Sometimes, it’s hard to use the brimstone on your tongue for good when those with a right to be pessimists seem to drag you down, but think before you spit fire at the cinderblocks round your ankles, because even under a cockatrice’s gaze, they’re people too.

In those long weeks where high school looks like a desert, we somehow learn to never be more fragile than the skeletons, or the eggshells we're walking on. But I’ve since learned and swear by the fact that life and living are two very different things.

I can't make up my mind if this is all more apology or anthem, but if I can recommend one thing, it's this:

Allow the complexity of language in the simplest of words to forcibly beat your heart. You won't always hear the words you want to, the words that might keep a desert salamander alive, and that would do the same for you if there were someone there to say them. So grasp at straws. Hear poetic words now, and poetic words later, no matter how ragtag they may or may not be, intricate or beautiful, both, or neither, and everything in between and not. Plaster in the cracks of your atrophied heart from those nights where your mother slams every door and threatens to never come back, and dear god, make use of whatever words in this world there are that bring comfort through even that.

When the drudgery of life interrupts the sensation of living, presenting you with a rigged inkblot that just won't do you right, look, in the absolute worst of times, rather than up at a sky you've seen every day of your life, look down.

When the inconsistent blue that you've seen on every week of every month of every year fails you, do not search for life saving inspiration in what you've seen a thousand times. See the intricate patterns in the wood floors you walk on. I know it feels so often as if the beam from the lighthouse has already passed you by, but a crack in the pavement, a blemish, might just be the greatest joy of your day when you spot the flowers that still grow in spite of how they’ve been tread upon.

Then, scan your neutral horizon to see the little people. The unprompted kindness, the shy smiles, and the people who never quite know what to do with their hands, because I cross my heart and hope never to die young that they've felt this way too.

A person ought to mean more in life than in death, so for the love of your own self, feel, even in the darkest of power outages, for anything that's always out there.

And it’s true, autumn leaves cannot save your life in the long term, nor even will the smile of a stranger. But as long as you keep saving room for the simple joys that make your heart beat overtime, you'll have the first ounce of leverage it takes to save yourself.