a change of scene
from a boy whose hands are tainted with my blood
whose heart knows the ins and outs of my love
to one whose last name still sounds new
what was his last name, again?

a change of scene
to a boy who smiles demurely
like it is a secret he is capable of something so beautiful
demure isn’t a word you would associate with a boy
but this one is;
soft in every sense of the word
and i’ve come to enjoy hearing him talk
about mundane things and important things

but often i feel i am falling
for the feeling of falling
loving for the sake of loving
often i feel i am being redundant in my proclamations of love
because i simply don’t love him
perhaps a change of scene is just that;
a change, nothing more,
nothing less

but it is entirely true that my heart trips when i see him smile
and that when my face is close to his my mind goes hazy
is this not how i felt last time? was i not in love before?

maybe i love him, i think i love him

maybe the third time’s the charm
maybe this one will stick
this love is somewhat uninspired
like a stand-in to convince myself
i can love someone else
and i can love artificially
without bleeding on the carpet
but it is also innocent
in the way i watch his lip curl
and get distracted when his eyes widen

this love
probably isn’t love
but it is warm and taking its own shape
and it does not cut me deep like i have been before
so what choice do i have?

an indistinct pang of guilt
when i hear birds chirping in the sun
and they sound nothing like the ones back home
and yet everything about them reminds me
of home

unbeknownst to these birds,
their chatter carries me across a continent
and across a sea
to a home where there are pocket sized versions of my family and i
where my grandmother is busying herself in the kitchen
and my uncle fiddles with the tiny TV facing the living room
filled with a cast of colorful characters
much brighter than anything this TV could give us

unbeknownst to these birds,
they carry me to a sand filled tent
where a single ray of sunlight enters from a gap in the entrance
and illuminates the book in my hands
and outside, their chatter creates a beautiful symphony
punctuated by the crash of waves on the shore
unbeknownst to these birds,
they warm my heart far more than any sun could

i hate these birds
the ones in my plastic backyard, outside my plastic house
guilting me into remembering;
this is not a home,
this is not my home.

poetry fuckboys exist solely in the notes folder on my laptop
and are only enigmatic because i make them so;
dressed in beautiful metaphors, skipping
to the measured cadences in my voice,
they are a lot more colourful

really, though, my poetry fuckboys
are nothing like the real ones who touch you because they’re bored
and leave grey marks on your skin
and probably i only write them the way i do
because it makes my ugly skin seem ethereal, etched with history
rather than scratched by years of carelessness

poetry lovers aren’t really real either,
at least for me;
more than anything, they are characters
that i fall in love with
because they are made of love songs i listen to
and the illusion that i am capable of love;
fiction based on lovers whose smiles, really,
fall flat and move nothing in my heart

there is nothing real, or subconscious
about the way my fingers ache
for no one in particular,
and attach themselves to those closest to me

boys who sometimes smile at me,
girls that seem to exist only to laugh
full belly laughs

and there are elements in my poems that are perhaps true
and visible if you knew who i wrote about
but this is not even remotely real,
living between pages of poetry
taking comfort in their warmth

and no matter how dressed up poetry is
i am not talented enough to pass a fake
as anything remotely genuine;
even poetry fuckboys and poetry lovers,
to whom i desperately show my poetry to prove i’m real,
realise i get stale pretty fast,
and eventually stop reading my poems.

i need you to understand that you didn’t make sense when you went from loving me, to hurting me, to wanting me; to be your firsts, to be yours, to forgetting i was ever that.

all in the span of a short-lived friendship. how am i supposed to wrap my mind around anything? around how distant you are now, and how nothing will make you want me?

how am i not supposed to reminisce, when everything that has happened was only a month ago? or two weeks ago, when you told me i was beautiful, and don’t you ever forget that, or when you spent a whole summer in europe texting me?

talking to me about the most mundane things, those are the conversations etched in my memory; those are the conversations i still don’t want to look at, because that is a low point i can’t ever reach.

you spent a whole summer in europe telling me you wish you could see me and saying the nicest things to me. i spent a summer rooted in my spot, waiting for you to see me, waiting to see you beautiful as always, but happy, nonetheless, that i got to talk to this sweet summer boy.

you talked to me like i was your girlfriend; don’t ever tell me that there wasn’t a point where we were almost that, because i thought: this is what good love must feel like, that comes easy and doesn’t destroy you.

then you did.

the easy answer is you’re just as broken as i am, and just as confused. that could also explain the girl who has swiftly replaced me.

but please be mindful of the hole you left in my life, because you were my good mornings, and goodnights, and afternoons when we weren’t too busy, and on the forefront of my mind when we were.

this is a bandaid ripped way too fast, and i still can’t reconcile the person i fell in love with over the summer, and the boy who won’t even look at me; the cold boy who has it in him to do awful things to me. you are not the same person, but even that doesn’t make it easy to fall out of love.

i am in love with someone who doesn’t exist except in my memories and texts. and if sweet, summer you isn't dead, i need you to never love me again because each time you stop i am left with even less. i'm starting to read again, and smile on days on which we don't talk, and getting here wasn’t easy; so i need us both to stop.

i’ve been grieving
for the girl who used to live here
who was sprawled on this bed
disgusted by her own body,
my own body,
and yet

i am grieving for her
and the bedsheets are privy to my despair
because i am shapeless and nothing
even though i am still the same body
except now it is the only thing of mine
that i’m not disgusted by

this is a body you want, is it not?
that you wouldn’t mind touching,
getting lost in for a fleeting moment
before you discard of me;
i used to think my body was the reason
i bored you
and that if you didn’t love it,
i shouldn’t either

but i think there was a lot
of my awkward laughter and awful jokes you had to get through
before you realised
maybe i could be
hot

and then it became a matter of
convincing me that you could like my jokes
and me, for all my faults and shortcomings

and there is no one i expected this less from
which is why i handed myself to you
with the tools and a handbook on how to dismantle me
and i told you things that made me
me, things i could never have back

and i gave you my body
with confidence i didn’t know lived within me;
you were the only one i wanted
the only one i wanted to want me
and for one night
i didn’t feel like a pit stop
but someone in love
who could be loved

i didn’t expect this from you
and i don’t know what to do with my body
because i didn’t expect our friendship
to be synonymous with you wanting to **** me
and i couldn’t imagine a world where
sweet, sensitive and awfully bad at flirting
you would make my body disposable

but my body
has been disposed of;
and so has my laugh,
and my jokes,
because you loving me
meant me loving me
and i don’t think you are mean
or evil for not wanting me

but i can’t even hate myself
because i don’t know who i am anymore

i’ve been grieving
for the naive girl who put you on a pedestal
and herself right next to you,
who was more ashamed of herself
than her love for you;

and
one thing
i know about the nameless person
lying in my bed
is that she no longer has it in her
to love herself.

do you want to know
about all the boys who have my skin burned into their memory?
or the boys who’ve touched me enough times that their fingers
move in a certain pattern across my hips
but their minds can’t differentiate between me and the next girl?

you say you want me to tell you about them
but do you want to know about the people
who have rearranged your daughter into someone you don’t recognise?
it’s possibly my fault you don’t know me,
but, mother, i don’t think you would love the fleshy redness of my inverted skin

there are small, but important tokens of me that you’ve collected
like a few of the scars on my wrists,
ones i told you i stopped carving years ago,
but how do you not notice the accumulation of darkened skin
and bandaids in the bin?
mother, i think maybe sometimes you see my rearranged body parts
and then look the other way because it’s not who you want me to be

in your head,
am i just your daughter
or my own person?
am i so indebted to you for giving me my life that you now own it?

i don’t even know what being my own person would mean to you
if all you know about me is carefully selected
by an idiot daughter

mother,
you ask me if i’ve been lying to you,
if i’m sure that last week i went out where i said i would
and i think neither of us are so stupid that we would be fooled
into thinking we are built on anything but an awkward bed of lies,
so, mother, please stop asking me
because i think my mom should be the type of person i can tell about boys
and wrists, and i wish there was some part of me
that felt you were more than just mother

who has never been fifteen and lonely,
who has never thought she was in love with a boy
how can you ask me to be honest with you
when your smile is painted on,
hiding judgments and disappointment before i’ve even disappointed you?

mother, i love you,
but i can’t be honest and perfect at the same time
and i need room to breathe
without having to hide every exhale from you
but i also don’t know how to change my perpetual lying
and awkward movements around you
so, mother, who do you want me to be?