girls like her won’t break you — girls like her will make you weekly playlists, and write you poems as you sit together on museum floors, and watch your favorite movies, and introduce you to new songs, and steal your hoodie while you read your long-pending books, and drag you out of bed at 2 am’s to watch the stars fall to the earth, and kiss you, right there and then.



and then, they break you.

oh, to live with sadness, so deep — it has started spreading;
i can feel its crushing weight: a stampede.

my trampled bones have started to resemble
wildflowers as they decay
and the soil flinches at the sight
of something so pure —
something so tainted.

behold, the lamb of god
has become the big, cruel wolf;
this is what happens to delicate things
after they're done breaking —
after they're done rotting.
this is what happens to pure things
after the sins and sacrificial rites.

behold, the lamb of god —
the scapegoat
has become the wolf

and one day, it will outrun the forest fog — spreading —
consuming.
devouring.
one day, it will outrun the howling in its chest.
one day it will outrun the ironic aching of ribs, long emptied.

oh, to be a girl and not a wolf.
to live with sadness and trampled bones.
maybe one day, i too, will outrun myself

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.

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.

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.

so you sew your melancholy shut –
pour your father’s ***
on the stitches
like you always do

i turn my back and bend over –
ache descending my backbone
where your kisses used to rest;
it recoils in instinct

as i keep on digging for the same mistakes
on skinfolds and chromatic bruises
and thin walls where i hung
my tendency to ache
scrubbed out of me like dead skin,
as i lie, washed, stripped, and tender
in these soft, celestine sheets;
i pepper bits and pieces of myself
to diffuse the hurting

but my pain is blinded;
yours, all-seeing
as i draw my three of swords
from my deepest deck of cards
but there’s already an epigraph
of your name on my clavicles
and you see how your all-elysian, moon-drenched lover
is all tainted, all this time,
and darling, how alive you felt
when you fell in love with this disaster
but the truth is staying in love
will always be your death.

and what i know to be deathless love
is now lost in our ghastly lights
and how we danced with liquid fire
long enough to feel it burn
but all roads lead to rome, darling –
all roads lead to ruin
and all the letters i wrote you are banners
burning in its cathedrals
as roman gods watched us
pick our limbs apart.

and do you think
we can love each other through this,
touch our way out,
love our way out of these

wars we waged —
burning houses,
mess we made
kisses dead in our stately wake
this love — this feeling
spilling like ether, leaving
squandered poems
all over the place.
had you known it all along
had you walked away?

but darling how alive you felt —
how alive we felt in love
but  one day you’ll call it crucifixion
and i’ll call it back  my death.

and we fall like sacred dust,
a bedlam of debris.
and i draw my three of swords:
dead-cold steel
and paper-soft sorrows.


do you think we have it in us to love each other out of this?

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.

I want my love to remind you of the first stars you see during the nightfall, of the movie soundtracks you sing under the shower, of the words from a book you can’t put down, of the scenes you remember from a half-forgotten dream.

I want my love to remind of you the first sunrise we saw together from my bed, of the coffee blend that made you realize you loved coffee, and of riding buses during sunsets, and of the first flowers that came right from your soul.

I want my love to remind you that despite its harshness and sadness, there is something kind and soft and gentle in this world, darling — and that you can call it home.

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.

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 miss loving you; i miss the calm and easy and content way of just kissing in the blue hour — clothes, falling out of flushing skin; mine was a map of scars named after estranged people, and yours, an anomaly of carnelians breaking at the softest touch.

and yet, nothing hurt enough. not the fading autumn days leaving us to fall apart in october. not the poems that painted this love to be more beautiful than it actually was. not the carnelians, breaking everywhere.

and i miss loving you, but this october rain isn't cleansing — it just falls cruelly on a heart too eager to break itself.  i miss loving you, but all these blue hours have corrupted what's left of your first tainted kiss. i miss loving you, but betrayal still rests comfortably on my skin: a map of scars named after people. a map of scars cut by carnelians. a map of scars named after you.

and this october rain isn't healing; it's just cruel.

it's just cold.

— fray narte

our falling apart isn’t like having heartbreak lines sitting on my chest, waiting to be written when i wake up and realize you’re gone. it isn’t like sinking into the absence of your coffee-scented lips on my temple, or walking into a dust storm caught in the sunbeams in your room. it isn’t like those cold, two a.m. nights where you find yourself singing stay with derek sanders and breaking down into a puddle of unbearable pain, hoping that each guitar strum will take you away from our memories.

no, our falling apart isn’t like that. it isn’t immaculate.

it isn’t an indie-film-kinda-heartbreak, nor is it poetic.

you see, we fell apart simply because you loved me — you loved me so ******* much, darling.

and i wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

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.

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

the butterflies and their dusted wings — they're sore under my tongue. i inherited the sting of my mother's wounds — her sunday madness and propensity for hurting. but not quite her bravery. not quite her capacity to carry such wounding weights. i am a washed-out silhouette. i cower, with lips blood-red from a tourmaline graze. i shake, i buckle, i drown, and sink. how then, do i say my words without turning them into a gospel made for wasteaways? how do i become half a woman she ever was? how do i live with myself?

long are these cold, clear nights of sobriety and awareness. long are these cold, oppressive seconds. i pull this dilapidated skin — wrap it all over me, resembling an unclaimed body in a morgue. solace exists, but solely outside these walls.

Sweet one, do I still owe you the same dreams?

I've grown kinder and gentler — inward. I've stepped out of my bruises, barefoot and cleansed: a mortal girl out of ***** foam. I've learned to soften the aching. I've learned to let go of things, including who I wasn't meant to be. I am no longer you. I am no longer your failures. Why then, do I still feel the need to chase the distant dreams you wished for? Is it because I still want them somehow — or because I feel like I owe those dreams to someone I no longer am?

Someone mourns and I am terrified: my skin, shrinking — closing in upon myself, for how can they break and not break at the same time?

— “I am sorry for watching you watch someone else die”

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.

And I spent years crying over people who could not love me enough, only to realize I was one of them.

We both know you would've broken my heart until there was nothing left to break, and I would've let you. I would've scattered petunias over the wounds you have re-opened. I would've carved you poems on flickering streetlights. I would've set sunrises on fire — kissed you as it died down. I would've skinned your neck open to know what turns my kiss into heartbreak, and what turns that heartbreak into poetry. And we both know you would've broken my heart until there was nothing left to break. It had been years, my love. It had been years on end.

And still, I would let you.

// "December has a softly cruel way of reminding me this."

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.

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.

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

i let go of myself mid-air,
suspended like a plastered sun goddess —
i long to be smaller. younger. incorporeal
but grief is royal mantle dragged in the mud,
draped on my shoulders, down to my limbs:
like a pair of sunbeams gone astray
and the sun has long left without
so much as a sorry letter.

still, i feel its hands
creeping to the parts of my lungs left untouched.
its glare spreads like rust,
telltale in the daylight glow.

soon, i will implode from all this alien warmth
like a colony of bats, a revolution for the dusk.
soon, the sky will recognize this ancient sadness
throbbing inside a mortal body
like a rejected ***** wanting to escape.

i let go of myself mid-air:
vivid and ugly under the softest parts of sunlight –
all dying in the dusk in slowest motion;
it washes over me. anoints. screams out in mourning
screams out ‘no’.

but i have taken my flights and fall.


i let go of myself mid-air.

i am looking at it now from afar — that certain kind of pain that would mirror mine; how immense it must be to go through it, and i can only imagine getting out. how immense the pain must be, how terrible, to wish for a kind of comfort only a certain, abrupt finality can bring. i am looking at it now from afar: skin as gray as mine and lately, the daybreak just brings in its rays more nights for us to swallow.

if it brings you any semblance of a cold comfort — the one you seek, i hope you know, i'll die in your place. i wish i can take it all away.

I'll always feel in my chest broken Septembers. I am languishing with the days, head first to a point of no return. I am the ghost of an abducted goddess, the one who bled all over saffrons and still holds on to her sorrows. I bid farewell to the sunglow on wildflowers. I bid farewell to daylit copper fields. I bid farewell to golden hours, as down I descend to the sweetest madness, and up it goes to consume me.

you always ask why i always stay in my room, in that voice that always made me feel small and vulnerable — the one that always made me feel like a five-year-old girl wishing that the blankets and the stars will hush the thunders.

you always ask why, dad, and yet you always find ways to hurt me the moment i come out of this four-walled shell, ashen and gray from all the storm clouds circling over my head. you always find ways to spot the cracks on my skin, like i was just another wall in this crumbling house. you always find ways lasso your words around my throat — tighter and tighter, i can no longer breathe. you always find ways to unhinge my mind; to unbottle all the tears and all the loose pieces of my heart hastily stitched out of place.

dad, i am caught in a trojan war brewed by my demons, and you are paris, piercing all of my achilles heels; stitched; tender; still healing from all the poisoned arrows you shoot — a year ago. two years ago. three. four. and for years and years, you always find ways to crush me, like the cans of your empty beer. you always find ways to crack and snap this bent framework; my bones are broken from the weight of your words. you always find ways to hurt me and hurt me and hurt me and hurt me again — like i was never the little girl you played dolls and cooking sets with; like i was never the little girl you watched disney movies with. like i was never the little girl you used to love — dad, i am still she, now trapped in the body of an adult. i am still she, now trapped in the prison of a dusty room you unknowingly co-erected. and i guess i'll stay right here where i'm trapped, but safe. i guess i'll stay right here where the voices only come from my demons.

i'll stay right here where you can't see me.

i'll stay right here where i'm not hurt.

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.