so here i am, walking away from cadillacs and city lights, as if skipping through soundtracks and photographs. above, the clouds have worn their black veils and the rain, it has started mourning each car i pass by, each block, each step taken. it mourns all the sorrows i cannot poke, all the letters i cannot write, all the words i cannot say.

the rain, it mourns all those summer days of pure bliss, with the sunlight peacefully fissuring through the trees. oh how we kissed, all soiled jeans and grass on sundresses. sweaty palms, hands on thighs, all yours prayers left on my neck. the cigarettes and dogwoods forgotten on our periphery.



i love you, i love you, i love you. you were the first, the last, the always.



and yet, how did we ever become that sweet summer’s downfall? the cigarettes are now ashed under all these spent lights and faint sunset colors. these mint breaths and sun-warmed kisses, now just bruises on my lips — now just memories slowly flaking off my skin.





and i used to love you. stupid, stupid girl.





now the rain has washed all those fields and the sins they’d seen. it has washed my skin of the lingering cigarette smoke, of your kisses, of your touch, and i’m not sure if i ever wanna forget. but even the rain’s heartbreak leaves behind the serenity of the last raindrops. lush grasses. damp streets. that distinct, morning breeze. that subtle scent of petrichor. that quiet settling of the calm.





maybe that’s all i need to know.

My 11:11s were made for sleepless nights
playing back all these scenes
when your heartbeat still melted against my ears,
every sigh that lingered on my temple,
every touch that lingered on my skin
11:11s were made for asking
this dimmed wall sconces what it would be like
to feel your body close the spaces,
to feel it next to mine once more,
of what it would be like to kiss you in the dark,
with complete abandonment,
like a wolf howling its heart out
to the moon after a sunset that lasted forever

It was 11:11, and now, I know
I should’ve closed my eyes
and kissed you that drunken April night,
and melted in your arms when I still had the chance.
Now, I close them, without you around,
wrestling with these fixations
trying to convince myself
that one more recall of the memories would be the last;
one more make-believe,
one more fantasy wouldn't hurt.
One more,

and one more,
and one more,
I said,

and it was 11:12
and suddenly,

it did.

Love, I said I wouldn't miss the sound of your early morning voice.
These sheets were weighed from all the times the dawn sent its sunrays
like palms filled with love letters;
but maybe I too, had become all the dawns that lingered too long.
I said I wouldn't miss the outline of your body;
oh how I planted kisses on every uncharted curve
but this bed is now a map of strangers from all these towns I do not know.

I said I wouldn't miss the hands, touching,
fingers picking each stray breath away;
I wouldn’t miss waking up next to you —
all serene, all magical than lucid dreams.

But darling, it's ten to twelve and our memories,
they covet me as the summer rain pours outside
and now,

I miss all these stupid little things;
the brief way you wince at papercuts,
the secret smiles after eye rolls
and radios turned to the max,
the way red lipsticks and love notes
linger on bathroom mirrors;
the water and steam have erased them now,
love, I miss the way you hog blankets;
the threads have now come undone,
taking down your scent with them,
all too painful, all too slow, it slips
even from these memories,

And I know I said I wouldn't miss you
but it's half past twelve, and I'm in your shirt
and the rain had stopped
but I think so far — so far love,

missing you has not.

so when you dissolve into a thousand poems you can never write trying to look for the way out, let go. even the moon melts parts of itself, and your skin, it is made from the cracks constellations have between its stars. and when december starts to breathe the last of its sadness — and how it lingers on your skin: a glass so breakable, let go; wilted flowers no longer flinch at a lightning's touch; you are made from the same matter — all cold lips and an ether of sighs. let go, darling. all this, because you are not just a girl. you are a storm without a calm.

tell me, how long do heartbreaks last? it has been a long while now, darling and i should have gotten over you already, but here i am still mailing my heartaches to september, hoping that its rains take it all away. i should have gotten over you but still, i have learned to hide my love in the crumpled edges of every unsent letter. i have learned to tuck it in a box of overrated heartaches. i have learned to silence it, just as i have learned to silence all the songs i can never listen to again without breaking.

i should have gotten over you by now but my here i am — palms made of longing and rust, reaching out for empty couches and empty beds — a stubborn instinct, a muscle memory carved in my brain. and despite all the fumbling, all the reaching — all these spaces can offer are poems spilled by these telltale lips, like lilies crowding a grave of what we were and what had been. i should have gotten over you by now, but what's the harm in failing? after all, i have nothing more to lose but made-up metaphors and midnights.

so these are all my high-hopes free-falling once more to the ground. so this is me, straightening up the crumpled edges. this is me, tearing boxes and looking at heartache in the eye. this is me, drowning in the songs we ruined no matter how much it rips my heart. and this isn't another one of those unsent letters; this is an apostrophe i never dared to write seven years earlier, cause darling, some heartbreaks, you turn to poetry; some heartbreaks, you just don't. this is a testimony about what it's like to say 'i love you', and you can hear the hesitations from the tip of their tongue. this is a testimony about what it's like to have someone slipping and fading away amid all your denials. this is about what it's like to kiss someone and see someone, and the living with the pain of not knowing it's your last. this is about what it's like to wake up one day, and one month, and one year after they leave without the emptiness getting any lighter. this is about what it's like to lose someone — to just lose someone right before your very eyes. this is a testimony, darling, about what it's like to lose someone — to just helplessly lose someone when you still love them so much.

hey.. i'm sorry i didn't call. i actually wanted to, but, well, you know me.

you remember that first time we stayed up until five in the morning? i told you that i only know the kind of love that slowly rips your heart. maybe it's because all i've ever known about love was from the kind that came from ****** up people — my mom, my estranged dad, charles bukowski. her. there'll be always be something in me that will crave the recklessness, the emotional distances, running red lights and messing around. you see, to me love was walking straight into greek fire, but you make me feel like it's divine — just staying put and watching the flames with your head laid on my chest.

so it's not that i don't want this. maybe i do, with a newfound intensity that terrifies me. there, i said it.. and it's unsettling, you see. cause i don't know how to love you with the kind of love that doesn't involve destruction. i don't know how i can love you without greek fires burning us — sinking us. so it's easier this way. telling you that this is going nowhere and that i can't love you. i can't love you. *******, i can't love you.

please. forget i ever said anything.

out there is the vast, primordial space. empty. infinite. timeless. and for billions of years, the stars had been killing themselves.

sweet one, isn't that very telling?

and i love you like this:

in these freshly washed sheets,
with our limbs tangling,
with your breath on my skin where my shoulder meets my neck
under your gaze,
under what's left of the stars,
in the air, the scent of coffee, and apple crisps, and something that's just purely you,
in these cold, quiet hours before the daylight,
in the every silent ticking of the clock
with newfound honesty
with newfound softness
with each calming of my breath,
with each time it's taken away
with the high of knowing you're here and we're here.
and with the fear of that high,
with the sunrise so far away
with us just lying here in the stillness, in the dark
in the inadequacy of poetry — darling this is peak experience. this is perfect.

you should know better than sacking hopeless places,
it is no glorious feat:
white hands,
erecting flags in the wounds of a pagan soil;
i wish i could've returned to dust right then.
white hands,
caressing softly the marks left by your whip
on my skin — now, a blank sheet,
wide open for your kisses;
but by now, your tongue should've known that
papercuts wound all the same.

my chest had been a burial place
for the nights i couldn't name;
and tonight,
my heart wants to leave behind
the very tomb —
the very body you seized for yourself —
the very host to your planted flags
and romanesque cathedrals
and brothels,
and tonight will be the crusades
for all these captured, lovely ashes
and all these captured, lovely bones.

and into the wind i'll be scattered.
and into the wind i'll go.
and honey, you may think you have won the war

but this is the song waiting in the taverns
that women will sing for you back home.

and they say a black hole weighs millions of solar masses; i don't know where that weight comes from. maybe it's from the guilt taken off the shoulders of the primordial gods, or from the chaos of the dying stars, or from the essence of every creature to ever live in this sad, bleak universe, and in the ones parallel to it.

and yet somehow, this celestial phenomenon has found its way inside my skin, and inside yours, and inside everyone's. and in some way darling, we've become the black holes we've learned to tame.

Somewhere in these long, midnight drives, somewhere in these litters of I love you's I never said, in the creases of my month-old sheets and in the calls I never made, somewhere between the daybreak and quiet Sunday mornings, between the lamp posts in the streets, between tonight and the first night I knew you, between the sound of hello's, and the sound of things ending for good — somewhere out there, darling, is a place where we've never fallen out love.

she had a darkness in her chest space shuttles hadn't explored.
it was said that stars died there.

so i will lay on your feet a heap of the nightfalls we mangled. i will pick you a handful of hibiscus and cigarette butts left rotting in hotel beds. i will brew and end storms until your eyes are all that's left. i will leave the loneliest love notes and patched up apologies on every curve, every arch of your spine, until you become a book of the musings i cannot hope write. i will cut my chest open and unbridle the black holes i have tamed — darling, i will let them devour all the galaxies but us, until you become the very sun and i, the dull glow of the moon's unlit side.

and you'll know that the vile truth is, i don't know how to love you without getting my heart broken.

"I guess we're all in varying degrees of 'not okay'."

"there were black holes forming inside you, you see — all glorious, all millions of solar masses. so darling, maybe that was the time sighs started to become so heavy."

the light, its every unsteady flicker
every unfolding beam — it's all just a farce;
at least over there,
in the shadows,
i cannot tell which areas of my skin
are cursed and befouled
and which remain untouched by the blade,
unscratched by my nails;
i cannot read the lines;
written whilst sad and lost,
drunk and sober.
all the wounds,
all the carcasses,
all the living and breathing parts,
all the hints of a vague gestalt —
now all fading,
now all unseen,
now all and entirely swallowed by the darkness.

and in the shadows, i have become finally whole.

his chest was the ground caving in
in a matter of seconds;
it was the streets' sudden tremors
the wall cracks
and chipped rocks.
his gaze, hauntingly sad,
it was almost inviting.
and i was a girl,
all white dress and wide eyes
not really knowing any better;
steps, too careful
walks, too slow,
tracing the faultlines
misplaced on his skin;

it was an open field —
an open target for the lightning to strike
and leave its marks
and i was just a girl,
looking for poems
where they shouldn't be found;
on the palm creases,
and the curves of his lips.
i walk,
all tentative tiptoes
and a wrong step;
falling into each hollow,
each crevice,
each slit.

he was an earthquake, waiting to happen
seismic and sudden,
taking everything down.

and i — a nameless girl,
an inkblot for face and limbs
a paramour,
a secret,
all wrapped into one.

i — a doorstep kiss,
an uncertain touch,
a bedpost notch,
all wrapped into one.

and i — a jamais vu,
a face in the crowd,
a nameless casualty,

all wrapped into one.

It's been a year and the streets are a little brighter, and daybreaks are a little colder, and everyone seems a little happier. But forgetting has become way harder and longer, darling, and Novembers still feel like losing you.

darling, loving me is falling apart with octobers and kissing your poems goodbye. it is watching autumns unfold while slipping into the tracks of a freight train. i will kiss your skin, all chapped lips and sweetened cigarettes, my hands on your neck, as if feeling the walls of an athenian ruin. i will be every distinctive silhouette in a film, every line in a song, every secret spilling gracelessly off your lips before you catch yourself. i will set you on fire and you will burn; all wide-eyed and irises made of the storm, beneath my feather light touches.

i have a proclivity for breaking hearts and you will find yourself neck-deep in whirl of heartbreaks and headlights — all moonstruck and confused. i will break you — destroy you, bit by bit, in the most elaborate, exquisite way, that you will know one thing, darling —

chaos has a tendency to look beautiful.

i wish knowing you're not worth the words is enough to make me stop writing about you.

but apparently, it's not.

and i wish i was sad enough or hurt enough or broken enough to actually feel something, and not just emptiness after emptiness after emptiness.

this is how i'll let you go:

i'll open our photo albums for the last time, touch the yellow edges where your body ends, and not get drunk on what we could have been. i will wipe the coffee stains you left in perfect circles; sometimes, i pretend that they had the color of your eyes when the sunlight hits them. i will scrub your fingerprints off my spine; it's time for them to let me go too — slower, gentler than the way you did.

i will pass by your street, and not send you a bunch of paper rings engraved with all my overused metaphors. i will not hope you'll chase after me, wearing them over the promises we've broken, and over the promises we're yet to break. i will stay up late; midnights are somehow still for missing you, but i won't be writing anything. and we both know it kills me — not writing poems about you, when loving you and losing you are the closest things i ever got to call poetry.

instead, i'll hold on tight on every word that spills out of my mouth, seal them all in a trinket box buried in some place where we let romance die. i will fall asleep next to our cemeteries, wet from the rains we made; i might wake up at 3 am and not think of calling you. and i will wake up at 7 am, when it's still raining, and i will watch the early morning thunderstorms, and i won't wish you're back with it. i will sit there, free from the damp coffee stains and from the traces of your kiss. my tailbone will no longer recall the intricacy found in your fingerprints, and my eyes — they will have forgotten if yours were cobalt or turquoise or electric blue, 'cause darling, maybe it's too late to make you love me again, but it's not too late love myself.

I know I have been okay for a while now, but it feels odd — not knowing how to handle being okay. I have been held captive by the emptiness — the kind that consumes you from the inside out. I have been that girl, trapped in a skin, and my wrists have become the walls she scratches whenever she tries to escape.

I have fallen apart with sunsets to déjà vus I have long forgotten, and my brain — it has become Eris incarnate and my body — her armless prey, walking willingly into her trap. I have been Ophelia, tiptoeing on a willow tree and drowning in a lake of deep, black butterflies. So being okay and all this — it doesn't feel right at all, and maybe it's possible to despair for sadness. Maybe it's possible to morph with the darkness I thought I wanted to escape. Maybe it's possible to ache for self-destruction with an intensity I've never known before.. I no longer know what's wrong with my brain, but maybe it's possible to feel so lost, so broken, so messed up for so long — that being whole feels like a mistake.