There were midnights when I could still tell you about my dreams. Of course, they were always about us — marvelling at the colors of the sky. With you, standing under the sun and getting lost in the afterglows and collapsing with the black holes sounded romantic. One night, I would dream about reading the books we collected together. Other nights, I would dream of kissing the tips of your lashes inside our blanket forts in terry cloth robes and Birth of Venus and Starry Night socks. Regardless, we would be up at 5 am — you with your whole bean coffee, listening to the tales authored in my sleep.

Except that in my dreams, it still feels like her instead of you. It always does. So tonight, I hope you keep yourself warm and touch the dream catcher tattoo on your nape and not think of me anymore. I know that I'm the reason for your sleepless night and memories dressed in nightmares, but tonight, I hope that you go back to sleep and no longer dream of the love I fabricated. And when it's 5 am, I hope you realize that you need something a little better than my dreams. I hope you brew your coffee to the right strength and no longer look at where I used to sit to tell you my daytime stories. So go back to sleep now. You'll be okay — without the what if's and the dreams and the happy ending written in our name. You'll be okay, darling.

You'll be okay without me.

i cold write poems about
klimt’s the kiss, soiled and stained in your garage,
how we’re all a mess of basorexia and urgent fingers,
darling, take me in your hands, i’m not gonna fall apart
like dead chrysanthemum petals.


i could write poems about long nights and long drives,
how the road had seen all those **** promises,
love, we’ll never repeat my parent’s history of falling out of love.
and yet history does rewrite itself
in different words,
different phrases,
different roads yet all the same.

i could write poems about
how you resemble the moon —
exquisite, beguiling,
and i am icarus,
all wide-eyed, all moonstruck,
all aware of the risks.

but no, darling

because as it turns out, this poem is about
the kisses planted on wrong places
and our bed, it’s filled with petals soiled by the earth.

darling, this is about us,
zipping ourselves in my parent’s skin,
oh how they lead us back to blood and bones
we’re running away from.

this is about the moon’s deceptive silver shades
and icarus,
falling,
plummeting,
crashing once more to the ground.

this poem is a mess of words
about our downfall.
this poem is a mess of words about you, darling.
a mess of words about you —
a mess of words about you gone.

Some days, the emptiness isn't even obvious. You're brushing your teeth or putting on your favorite denim jacket or adjusting your wristwatch and it's there, lurking and you don't mind at all. It almost feels normal. Right, even.

But there are days and nights — mostly nights, when it feels colossal, you can't ignore it. There are times when it stares back, it's impossible to pretend it's not there. There are times when it feels out of place and you just sort of wanna dig for what's dead inside, or claw through your ribcages, or crack your chest open — anything, just to get it out of you.

and how brave you are, for getting up and breathing again after the night had shattered your ribs.

it had taken bones,
reshuffled and pounded to pieces
fingertips,
scorched
from molding cast irons,
worn, from unsewing and re-sewing heartbeats
and wrists,
white from scarring,
for me not to break
at the slightest touch.

today, i will wake up and think of you. the first thing will be about how your eyes had the color of all the storms that left this year. next will be your hair, in flaming red, as if to make up for all the colors your heart has been drained of for loving me. then, i will think of the way i wrote you poems amid writer’s block; every line, a compulsion, an obsession of i love you's rephrased. i will think of the feel of your skin, cold, but burning, like mercury fires crashing to the poles.

then, i will remember the chipped nails and back scratches and the heat of the whiskey, rushing from your mouth to mine. i will remember october and her rooftop letters we sealed with the skyline's silhouette. i will remember how they have become a foliage of words i refused to stop writing — and words you refused to read. i will remember how we wished to be paper cranes flung to the sun, how i have become icarus incarnate, falling, and crashing back to the earth. today, i will wake up and remember how loving you became my flight and my downfall. i will let the pain eat me up, rip my lungs, one flashback at a time. i will let the pain break me and break me and break me until there's nothing left to break.

and then one day, i will wake up darling, without sleeping next to make-believe alternate endings, without addressing you in apostrophes, and without the storms tailored to be metaphors for you. one day, i will wake up without wondering if you were ever hurt the way i was. i will wake up without thinking of you. i will wake up without the slightest traces of pain.

and then i will let you go.

I know a thing or two about couple stuff, darling, and neither of those fits in the space in your heart. The rest of the world basks in love and all its typical aesthetics, you know, the usual; holding hands while overcoming fears and jumping off buildings, and sitting at beach under the midnight sky, talking while meteors come to listen, and staying in small-town bookstores for hours and seeing metaphors from the steam coming off their favorite coffee brew.

But then, loving you isn't all about walking down a trail of roses under pretty sunset hues; it's not sharing the same wanderlust and flying to countryside Europe. Loving you is writing alternate endings to a tragic film, only to find it even more frustrating. Loving you is getting ****** in wormholes leading to chaotic, parallel realities. Loving you is crashing on brick walls, and dancing under the falling debris made to look like a summer rain. Loving you darling isn't like love at all.

But if you give me a chance, I'll kiss you in the subways and make poems out of it, as if the meeting of our lips creates milky ways and all other celestial bodies poets write about.

So let me love you, darling, despite all of this.

Let me love you, the way you deserve it.

Let me love you nonetheless

sometimes, we all wish for the world to just stop spinning for a while; that we remain sixteen or nineteen forever — just dreaming of painting the marmoris of the sea and seeing it displayed in a museum. just dreaming of browsing bookstores — each book sinking into your effleurage, until you see that cream-colored cover with your name on the spine. just dreaming of hearing a song from a stranger's car, and call it your own. just dreaming of creating stories out of piano keys. just dreaming of discovering a star.

at least, if the world stopped spinning today, a dream can remain as a dream forever. it will never be another thing we messed up. it will never be another dream we lost.

i remember being drunk on
our rainy day kisses and the city streets,
the aimless drives and the stolen cigarettes,
gasoline and i love you's suspended in the air;
i remember wanting that day to last.

i remember all the poems i'd written,
my fingertips,
on your back
and all the caffeine we'd run high on,
shaking,
panting,
whilst making love.

back then, writing you poems didn't feel
like relapsing into self-destruction —
writing you poems didn't mean
that i had to break my own heart
just to keep our future whole.

but now, i am lost in a sea of poetry
all written after you;

darling, the last one you read —
the one before you left
wasn't even the last.

and now, i am caught in a thunderstorm
named after all your unsaid goodbyes.
and now,
you feel
like a pit of heartaches
i can sink into anytime.

and clearly, this isn't poetic anymore —
these are just words tied together
to poorly model our august sunsets.
and clearly, this isn't us anymore —
these are just bodies
buried in a pile of mismatched heartbeats.

and clearly, this isn't love anymore, darling.
this is just me, writing about what's left of it.

And how do you tell them you feel so empty without making it sound so sad?

there are days when my room turns into an ocean and i, a shipwreck of the person i used to be. i know i'm supposed to save myself — they tell me i'm supposed to clutch onto a lifeline of heartbeats attached to the shore, that i'm supposed to drain these night-tides dry. but my sadness is born from the seafoam and the seafoam — it's everywhere.

it's everywhere.

they tell me i'm supposed to save myself, that i'm supposed to sink my maelstroms on the bleakest of the sea beds. but how do i tell them that i am the maelstrom that needs destroying? how do i tell them that i have become the love child of melancholia and of the ocean after the storm? they tell me i'm supposed to live — i tell myself i'm supposed to live. but today, i'm quite okay with sinking into the depths the ocean floor.

today, i'm quite okay with not saving myself. today, i'm quite okay with drowning.

honey,
we do not
burn down
with the fire —
we become it.

I used to be that girl who believed in staying close to the things and to the people who make you feel human — make you alive. But these days the book clutters look just like a patch of misplaced stars while the dusk crawled in my head, and the poems look better when they're crumpled or written in red inks and on my wrist, and all the songs just come and go. Today, I let all four of my cacti die. Today, my eyes took the form of the nimbus clouds, and my body reeked of petrichor; maybe it has returned to dust. Today, I felt too empty to even mind the emptiness. And today, I would've written a eulogy to that girl who used to believe that we should all stay close to the things and to the people that make you feel human and alive.

The thing is, sometimes we're not alive anymore.

there's a reason for all the midnight cigarette breaks in the fire escape while hoping my mom won't smell the smoke. there's a reason for every uneven haircut; products of sleeplessness or stagnation or something i no longer understand. there's a reason for the paperbags of dysphoria and cheap bourbons lying untouched beneath my bed, and for the days when my bed felt like home and home meant emptiness and emptiness was preferable to my favorite song or to the scent of the beach. there's a reason for letting go of all the obvious lifelines and deliberately sinking into this disarray of black holes. but you breathe marigolds and sunlight dipped in bottled petrichors

and tonight, i no longer know how to translate my storms into a weather you can understand.

nothing i do will you bring back;

not the shoebox of purple hyacinths
watered by the i love you's
i still wanted to say.

not the prose poetries i wrote you
whilst caught in a mania
in the restrooms of dying gas stations.

not the caving in of the see-through walls
mixed with static humming of the payphone calls.

not the pillow telegrams that smell like
bourbon and my mother's cigarettes;
darling, my bed has become a post office
of the letters i never had the chance to write
and of the things i never
had the chance to say.

and nothing i say will bring you back —
not even this poem, and i know that now;
i just don't know
how to live with that.

still, nothing will ever bring you back
and darling, watching you fall out of love
feels like the only thing i can do right now.

I've spilled your name
and my feelings
on fallen lashes
and wishbones.
I've read 1950s
love letters and wondered
if we would've had
exchanged some
had we lived that time.
I've stayed up late
in air-conditioned rooms;
a ****** for midnight voice
between your broken smiles.

But boy, this isn't
a confession of how
enchanted I am of you.
This is just me realizing that
somehow,
you can make a dismal world
look a little less messed up;
god, you're beautiful for it.

This is just me realizing that
I can stay with you
for all the reasons
they left you for.

This is just me realizing that
I can fall for you,
so, so deep,
if allow myself.
and feel like I was falling to the clouds.
Boy, this isn't love,
but somehow, it's so much more.

This is a saving grace
wrapped in chipped nails
and stories that make you feel
more human.
This is a silver lining.
This is chance.
This is light,
This is hope
for damaged people
like us.

This is us —
surviving.
This is us —
living.

And maybe all I need is my 30-year old self to come here right now and tell me that everything will be okay, and that I made it.

— “I would’ve totally done that for my 13-year old self”

i lied there on the pavement, eyes fixed on the big dipper, waiting for the stars to fall apart all at once, or for a car to run over me, whichever came first. and there i was, staring at the space and the emptiness looked back at me, and for a second, it felt like looking at my own chest; the stars, my bones, slowly coming undone. i wondered if someone felt that way too. i wondered if someone else gazed at the constellations and thought, maybe the stars are disillusioned with the galaxy and so that’s why they fell during meteor showers. or maybe they were lost causes dressed as angels jumping off bridges in heaven, ever the cynic. maybe it wasn’t something poetic. maybe it was watching celestial bodies

i lied there on the pavement, under flickering lamp posts that looked bigger than the stars. the poems always said that stargazing is romantic it wasn’t. ironically tonight, i lost count of the falling stars while wondering why they’d gone too soon. wondering if they’d survived the fall. wondering if they knew that their descent was burying me in the sound of my breath. maybe in an hour, the black space in my chest would consume me and then i too, would be a shooting star lost in peripheral views.

and i hope i would survive the fall. and i kind of hope i wouldn’t.

We were always so good at pretending, weren’t we? We would always climb rooftops and pretend that we were stargazers, christening constellations with our favorite songs. Look, there was Somebody Else. There was Nobody’s Home. There was Chasing Cars.

We would pretend we were souls from the 50s, reincarnated into another life — into another happy ending. We would pretend we were art critics, as if we knew **** about Klimt; as if we could tell apart baroque from classical. We would tell each other our weirdest dreams and analyze them, as if we were Freud or something, that misogynistic pig. Oh, you dreamt about us drowning together in the Black Lake? Oh, that means we were gonna have *** tonight, in the absence of the moon. We would pretend that we’ve circled the whole world and that Italy’s got the ******* blandest pizza. We would pretend that we were rock stars, surfing on the crowd.

We would pretend that we’d read the classics. Was that Harry or Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray? Yeah, Hamlet was pretty cool, but who was Ophelia? ******* pseudo-intellectuals, we were. Nonetheless, I loved pretending with you. We loved pretending that the whole world wasn’t crashing down — that we weren’t stuck in this ******* of a small town, and that the world spun for us. We loved pretending that everything would be okay — that we could leave someday without looking back. We loved pretending that our lives weren’t all over the place. We loved pretending that we were the brave ones, that we could **** ourselves by 40 because the world wouldn’t be kind when we’re all old and saggy.

We loved pretending that we were too cool for mental breakdowns and for any kind of feeling. Honey, we loved pretending that we were psychopaths, too voided for love and all that other crap — that we hated clichés, while doing the most romanticized clichés anyway. We loved pretending that this was where the chapter would end, and that we were together in our make-believe ending. We loved pretending that we were the ones who stayed and made it.

Now, sometimes, I would pretend that we did. Other times, it would be me pretending I was all there ever was — that you never were here to pretend with me, and that I was okay. I would pretend that the rooftop wasn’t too high, and that I didn’t need your help to climb — that the company of city lights and the empty space were enough, honey they never were. Honey, I would pretend too that I never missed you. But I did.

I always did. More than that I would ever admit.

I would look at the stars, the ones we named but I guess they all had already fallen to the earth. You said that when you died, you would live in the shooting stars so that you could crash to the earth and come back to me. But it had been more than a decade since the angels took you away and I no longer stargazed, except tonight. And maybe, just maybe, when I would catch a glimpse of a falling star, I still wouldn’t wish that you didn’t chase your meds with *****. I wouldn’t wish that we didn’t find bubbles coming out of your mouth, like they were a part of your soul. I wouldn’t wish that I didn’t see you die. I wouldn’t wish that you were okay; we both knew we wouldn’t have clicked if one of us was happy or okay.

Heaven, hell, we didn’t believe in those. But when a star would fall unto my chest, I would wish that wherever you were right now or wherever you would be in the next life, darling, you would no longer feel the need to pretend.

And with no lies, no masks, no pretenses, I loved you. Here. And in the next. And in the lives after that, until we lived in one where we would both have the courage to abandon all pretense and just sit on a different rooftop, sharing silence — sharing honest thoughts — sharing the luster of distant stars. And tomorrow, our demons wouldn’t rise with the sun. And we would be okay.

Let's cut the crap and all that sweet **** — we weren't those kind of people. We weren't made for romance and sappy poetries, weren't made for love songs, and cringey sweet nothings and gazing at the sunrise after camping out for the night on a hill. We were made to hold hands and a few almost-kisses during drinking sessions and forget about it the next day, to smoke and lie down a little bit too close to each other on rooftops and talk about depression and anxiety attacks, and deny everything in the morning. We were made for my unsaid "I miss you too's", that want to escape my lips the moment you say your drunken "I miss you's". We were made to see each other break down in between a pack of cigarettes and two bottles of local ***. We were more like two ****** up souls recognizing each other; more like two faultlines causing an earthquake and taking everything down with them, more like the first raindrops to fall apart before a thunderstorm, like two planets out of orbit crashing on each other in a brief but destructive way.

You see, maybe we're just drawn to people similar to us, and maybe, we're just drawn to each other because we're equally messed up. Maybe it was just the strong urge to save the other that borderlined to romance. But I guess being messed up wears people out, and sometimes I find myself wondering who got exhausted first. Where did the talks about "wanting to die together" go? When did the conversations about our saddest secrets cease? What stopped "Man, loving you is a disaster I won't mind being struck by," from coming? Was I too depressive and sad for you? Were my breakdowns suffocating? Did my fuckedupness stop feeling like home and started looking just plain ****** up? When did you start fading away? Why would you do that? Stupid questions.

You should know, it beats the **** out of me to say it, but I was perhaps a little bit desperate for you to stay. Perhaps I got too comfortable with your demons, I almost adopted them as mine. Perhaps the fact that you were willing to give me your ******-up all was comforting. Perhaps I was selfish, and I kinda wanted my darkness to be the only darkness you'll wanna light. Perhaps I miss you and it feels like I'm a chainsmoker on withdrawal from her cigarettes, and what ***** more is that I don't even know if I still cross your mind as that same sad girl you were happy being sad with, as that same sad girl who had always been your destination, and the very same one you apparently stopped coming to. And perhaps, thinking about all of these is *******. We weren't some modern-day knight and damsel. You weren't the guy with the beautiful blue eyes, and I'm not the girl with the blue washed denim they sing about. We were just misfits who made a mess out of the messed ups we already are, as if that isn't already enough. We were just planes thrown in the air, hoping to land, but ending up crashed and burnt. And that's how it always worked for people like us.

I was never worn out by your sadness as much as I was worn out by mine. And clearly, you were my favorite messed up, but, you're just not worth it anymore. And this — this is a just an unpoetic musing about the wrecks that we are, an impulsive attempt of detoxifying you out of my system. This — this is me, disowning your sadness; this is me disowning your demons. So let's just cut the drama and all that sweet **** — we weren't those kind of people. We were the almost-but-not-quite's, the could've-beens, and the never were's. We weren't the kind that bags the happily ever after. We weren't the kind that makes it.

All we are is everything short of lovers. All we're made for is everything short of I love you's. And this is everything short of love.

There was something bittersweet about tangling my arm with yours as we finally crossed (or zigzagged through) the lines that had been blurred for quite awhile now. It was nowhere near a fairytale. Maybe it was something about you being the most beautiful, saddest thing I’ve ever seen, and maybe it was me being drawn to everything sad. Maybe all we had been is a cocktail of alcohol, terminal loneliness, and pent up ****** tensions, brewed somewhere between these nicotine-scented sheets and a series of bad decisions. It’s not love, just wanton desire, I’d say. And you’d agree in the mid of hitched breaths and sloppy kisses. And that was the last thing in our minds before we fumble over the zippers and get lost in each other’s uncharted skin.

Of course deep down, we know that you’re everything that’s bad for me, and that I’m not the type to stay naked in bed the morning after the night to make you pancakes. But the way your lips drugged mine into kissing back, the way we said things we’ll never say when we’re sober, the way there was suddenly too much clothes and too huge gaps between our bodies all seemed comforting and sinfully magical. Of course deep down, we know that we’ll never stand a chance out there doing real-life romance; I wasn’t the one you were looking for, and you were just somebody I found.  But right now, in this cramped apartment with leaky ceilings and creaky floors, all I wanna do before sanity rushes back give in to "**** this", make all the wrong choices, and self-destruct with you.