i'll always love you like you were the fullest sunlight laid gently on the dark bruises of december. my crystalline hands are bound to start wildfires in your name. and finally when the world burns down, i'll mark your spine with these lips made of sunburnt flowers. in the ruins of it all, you still have all my misguided kisses — all my unbidden words. i'll always love you, until azaleas grow on the softest spots, in the mundane collision of our bodies. i'll always love you, until my ribs fall apart to your autumn eyes, like a babylonian temple that has seen the miracles of god. i'll always love you — in state of both madness and kalopsia. in the explosion and rebirth of the stars. i'll always love you — this is my bareness in the most prosaical state. this is my constant, darling — this is my truth.

unzip my wrists —
fragile, handle with care.

i am drunk with the thought of them breaking,
resembling quartz veins
down in the mines.

unzip my arms,
this is an enclosure —
it is safe from all-seeing eyes.

unzip my skin —
i am bag of sorrows and bones
waiting to be unpacked
in a new rental room.
the walls are white; the sheets are clean; the flowers are fresh
and i sit in the middle of it all:
a slashed, opened mail
spilling shadows —
like a ghost inside a house.
a parasite inside a host.

unzip my body:

i am strikingly
all things
anti-thetical —
old
dark
ugly
haunted —
a herald of infestation —
here:

the walls are white; the sheets are clean; the flowers are fresh,
the sunset is warm — comforting.
the world spins in a blur.
and i sit quietly, in apprehension,
stuck in the middle of it all.

a ghost.
a prey.

the room is spotless —
i step out of my skin.

i hold in my hands all of the sea’s sadness,
press it against my chest;
drench my shirt and then my being
until i resemble its loneliness —
the very depth of it.

soon, the ocean floor will claim
my driftwood bones.



but there are no sunbursts or naive greek boys.
just surreal june midnights.
just water everywere —
nowhere.

i hold in my hands all of the sea
but there are no sunsets waiting
to sink down my spine —
just the cruel way that my skin goes on and on —
its flat, certain vastness
and this ironic drowning.

i hold in my hands all of the sea’s sadness —
press it against my chest;
drench my shirt and then my being
until its loneliness fills my lungs.

​

​i come up for air but it’s just endless skin —
i close my eyes and dive again.

some things, too soft for my careless hands — nectarine kisses and sunlit skin. the quiet highs of being held, like dahlias dying after a month. vervain wrists dipped in a borrowed prose. your heart — and mine; my love, some things, too soft to not break in my hands.

slice my tongue until the pieces resemble flower petals — until poems tremble on my very lips. on summer afternoons, they will look like the dried amaranths on your bedside table — in a city apartment you left. slice my tongue until the pieces resemble smoky quartz. it will sit quietly — each side showing the wild and quiet ways of aching. slice my tongue until it heals its wounds — until the sunset casts what's left of its light, and maybe my state of decay will finally look beautiful.

it's been ten years — ten long years but all around me lies this casual atrocity of how easy it is to slip back into sadness, as though it’s the only thing my body knows well

i have had a bad habit of grieving things that haven't left yet, my love, and it will be the death of me. i will give you all the dusk skies that fit inside my fists — this the dullest aching that my heart can hold. one day, it will fade into the colors of my loneliest nights. i hope that tonight, i will choke on all the longing i'm yet to feel — and maybe when you leave, no breath will be loud enough stop the time in crowded airports. no breath will haunt you in manhattan's streets. no breath will beg for you to stay. i hope you find someone to love; i hope city lights fall softly on her neck as she hums your favorite song. i hope her skin tastes like daybreaks and poems. i hope sunsets live and die for her, and that you too, live and die for her and all the cosmic flickers in her eyes. i can already feel you loving her and maybe soon, i'll be forgotten, like this letter under your bed.

maybe soon, i, too, will forget the sound of your laughter. in death, it's the last sense to ever go.

i have a bad habit of grieving things that haven't left yet, and this letter is for when you say goodbye my love. this letter is for when you finally leave.

is there a way out of here other than the sudden violence of tearing through my skin? if i  find an escape route one day, i swear to god, i would leave even the calmest sunsets behind.

i'm still building myself up on top of breaking skin. oh how easy it is to slip on this shapeless, humming loneliness until it takes the form of my skin. i'm a forsaken deity, learning to come to terms with what's left of her ruins. crumbling, i tie them together — they buckle in place like my knees: a sight too fragile to be a worldly wonder. i'm still learning to be gentle. i'm still learning to forget all the ways i have ever hurt myself. and beyond this corpse-cold bed, these corpse-cold hands — the world goes on spinning. restless as my thoughts, yet immobile as my feet. it goes on spinning — leaving, never slowing itself down for anyone.

these words come out of my tongue, in fragments. i pick them like aphids on a rose — maybe it's the closest thing i'll get to healing.

maybe some types of chaos do not have to make sense or unveil some semblance of an epiphany. some types of chaos, you just have to feel. some types of chaos, you just have to lie through.

If I had it my way, I would leave myself behind.

put me, lovingly, in a hearse, the way the dusk lays it shadows;
the night threatens to spill off my pores
trying to run from lonely places —
now, it bleeds all over me.
a sight of a mess.
a sight of horrors
and no napkins for wiping.
no napkins for grieving.
some just don't
make it out alive.

tell the daylight i cannot come.

put me, lovingly, in a hearse.
no, i am not made for burials —
it's for the ones left behind;
tell them all

i cannot come.

leave me, my sweet one, lying in this hearse,
the way the dusk leaves its shadows in the arms of the night.
sweet and fragile.
quiet and gone.
send me off, softly.
send me off, mourning.
send me off, for good.

tell the daylight i cannot come —

maybe i'll see her too, so soon.

— fray narte

More than anyone, I owe myself a constant stream of apologies because one isn't enough for my self-transgressions. I wrapped my wounds in crimson lace so as to disguise them as softness and still, my skin is a rusty can of worms to every clueless stranger. Still, it leaves an ugly scabbing, even flowers dare not to grow. I owe myself myself a stream of apologies, for chewing on daylight countless of times — biting down hard until my tongue bled and spit out a carcass of dusks. I have carried it, buried it beneath my spine, until my back has become a living headstone people carelessly drive by. I wish I too, could forgo this mourning, like the rest of the world. Still, I find myself waking up to apologies left on my doorstep. Maybe one day I'll mean them. And maybe one day, I'll take them and accept them all. For now, I'll let my mouth be an exit wound for this aching — though it's never small enough to leave. And I'm never small enough to leave.

Maybe one day, I won't have to. I hope one day, I won't have to.

i can still feel it — the ghostly echo of storm clouds it in my throat, now dry and emptied of the softest sighs. they all had fallen on my flower-bed skin, pristine as the petals that once were. or so i pretend. i can still feel it in my throat: the storm, looming. the calm drowning itself, and its haunting, beckoning call to which my feet slowly walk.

some days, it's just you and the uncharted depths of your own skin.

some days, you can bother with poems — some days, you can only drown.

no i am not kind, i will pull your heart out of your chest — stain it with fleeting moments of softness before running it over with my train-wreck hands. i will pick you wild roses — they all die in my palms; maybe so will this love. i will kiss you and hold you, as we slow-dance our way to disaster; all we can do is sigh and crumble like greek ruins dying in a modern city. is it so bad, then, loving you with the kind of love that breaks and terrifies, and leaves you hurting and burning and wanting more? is this so bad, then, when it's the only way i've ever loved, and the only way i've ever known?

These fantasies always end with you staying. Here, my heart can afford to break itself, over and over for you. Here, I never had to let you go again. Here, my love for you always — always outweighs the heartbreak. My love, these fantasies — they always end with us staying.

I guess some things, I wish we had. Some things, I wish were ours. Some things, I wish were us.

i need a safe place to take off my skin and scoop out all the sorrows it carries. it peels. it burns, like a banished soul. but i have stopped saying my prayers — they just crumble into a ghostly sigh. i need a safe place — to take a peek at my demons without looking like one of them: a hurtful father. a forsaken son. a snake that sheds its memories and sins. i need a safe place to still my breathing — without my fingers pressed on a bruise and without my hands around neck. i need a safe place — a place away from all these thoughts, away from all these hurting. away from all of me.

I can never walk away from you. Not by the gods who all looked on as I ran out of reasons to make you stay. Not by the forget-me-nots I willed to die under my pillow. Not by the poems you never knew were yours. Between us, I can never be the first one who leaves because I'm terrified — of you, moving on to a life I'm not a part of. I'm terrified of confronting the choking weight of emptiness in cold mornings.

To walk away from this is something I never learned; that is my downfall and your strength. And I guess the difference between us is when I said that I was terrified of you leaving — when I said that I was terrified of losing you, I meant it.

I meant every word of it, my love — I meant every word that you did not.

You deserve someone who can look pain in the eye — an insignia of heartbreak with your name written all over it; your trembling sighs — like rust, lingering over their rosegold lips, and still, not forget that they love you.

The ocean is always deeper than what we can see. Maybe to hold a place for sorrows. No matter, bind me. Hold me down with a stone carved with the words to a funeral song. Sink me into the water until my skin resembles it — a deep, dark place for sorrows. A deep, dark place for a grave.

The ocean is always deeper than what naked eyes can see.

How much more breaking do I have to do until my heart numbs itself? I am sick of this routine — my chest sewing itself just to be ripped apart once more. I wish I can leave it be — an open wound for the flies. And yet, how many more wounds are there until there is no healing scar left to tear? I am sick of this routine. Tonight, I wish my heart would just tear itself into a handful of benumbed pieces. And tomorrow would stare at me — an aftermath of a storm. A heaving curiosity. A girl, lying in pieces and with no heart left to break.

In all ways, I have lined up my scars and written them insincere apologies; each word — a mockery and a transgression carelessly thrown in the night. I have allowed dread to settle deeply between my collar bones: an arrow buried between antlers until it unsettles and chokes. I have sewn sadness into my skin, like a dainty, silk sundress; worn it to church and to the funeral mass of a little girl I had to ****. She'll never know how much I mourned her, how on some nights, I still do. In all ways, I have looked at my skin, my fingers, and calves, and tailbone and saw a body that's never known gentleness or summertime souls or the gentle falling of the rain.

So after all of that, how, then, can I hold my heart now, without ever breaking it?


Tell me — how long can I hold my heart without ever breaking it?

such softness i covet compulsively, and yet all i can do is watch myself dig a mass grave for the white tulips i ripped apart. watch myself crumble like weathered obsidians. watch myself unbottle self-addressed apologies, and choke on all the softness i never had —

until all there is is my skin, drenched in ghostly disquiet.
until all there is is an ugly sight of breaths, hoarded as they fall.
until all there is is just breaking.

and until all there is,




is me.

to kiss you senseless until i am a seaglass buried deep inside your skin. to lick salt off your palms with paper-cut lips, until each breath has gone haywire. to quietly sigh your name until it baptizes my heathen tongue. oh, the wars i would start; the wars i would end — darling, there is something soothing about all the violent ways i can love you.

How many more girls should die in my poems just so I don't become one of them? How many more girls should die by their hands each time I felt like dying by mine?

Nights now belong to January, and I have started losing count.

I find myself chasing highs only to jump from them. But no, I am no comet. I am just a girl — all sunset eyes and gasoline. All dust grain and stale cigarettes. Shaky lips and broken mugs. Broken matches. Scissors running over my skin. Is it so bad then — wishing for my bones to finally break this time?

I find myself chasing highs only to jump from them, so save my poems and all my tales. Save me the apologies I cannot say. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.

"It's not enough."

"No, it's not. It's okay."

Save me the apologies I cannot say.

And once more, I find myself chasing highs only to jump from them. And this time, darling, there is no way to survive the fall.

My hands still remember the quiet aching of these wounds — too deep and wide for stitches and shaky hands. And so, I never learned to unpack my grief. It still is in a suitcase with December dusks and dreary summers — shut in secret library walls. I never learned to unpack my grief because I'm terrified that when I do, it'll be way too messy to place it back where it belongs.


Some things, we never tell ourselves out loud.