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.

Maybe I left my dreams in the last song I sang in the shower. Maybe you left yours in your first, half-empty cigarette pack, still hidden beneath a pile of clothes.

Maybe somewhere along the way, it wasn’t our dreams that died, darling — it was us.

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.

it's almost midnight and i'm drowning in every ******* poem i ever wrote for you — in every ******* poem you'll no longer read.

out there wafts jupiter's quiet grief as it loses its moons — does mine ever compare?

i toss my sighs into the thinnest air, like a brief lesson on how easy it is to vanish. how doable. how hard.

“You needed someone who could fix you.”

A pause filled the air after I had said those words — not because we didn’t know what to say, but because we knew it was the truth. Sometimes, there was no way out of the truth.

You needed someone who could fix you — someone who would make you a playlist of the favorite songs you’d thought you’d already forgotten — someone who would take you to museums and laugh as you spill coffee on its clean floors. You needed someone who would look at you like you’re made of tiny poems caught between their eyelashes, someone who would hold your hand as the mountaintops melt into silhouettes from the rearview mirror, someone who would give you a box of a hundred hand-written things they love about you. Darling, you needed someone who could fix you — someone you could live for. And we both knew that I wasn’t that person, for darling, what I needed was someone I could fall apart and crumble with. What I needed was someone who looked close to my demons, someone who could crush my snow globes and trace poems on my skins with all its broken bits. I needed someone I could watch the summer nights fade into repetitive dawns. Darling, I needed someone who I could stay broken with and yet still feel human and whole.

And regardless of how much we could try to love each other, my hands would always find their way back to placing cigarettes between your lips. Your hands would always find their way back to writing poems for someone who could save you — and honestly, I no longer even know how to be someone you’d still write poems about. So I would say it again. You needed someone who could fix you. You needed someone who would fix you.



And all this time, I needed someone who wouldn’t fix me.

My own skin — a skin that’s worn me out, I have scrubbed it raw and dry like a sorry imitation of Capitoline Venus, but statues manage to crumble so quietly, draped in wood dust and without so much as a heartbeat. And girls like me don’t know yet the weight of the things they have to lose: such as, 100 pounds — all bones, and coffee breaths, and yesterday's light straying, forgetting, falling off.

Now it has buried itself.

Maybe it's all still here, like storms made of bruises and the relics of Carthage under siege. Here, like the laments of a Sunday morning while staring back at tragic eyes. Maybe it's all here, somewhere in this layer of skin beneath the white lines on your wrists. Now the blade just feels like another stranger coming home at 4 a.m.

It was right here in the bones of a girl that once was made of sunlit blunders and curiosities; if you dig deep enough, you might exhume the remains of what she used to be — all purple vervains and the poems she swallowed whole.

Oh, that cruel, cruel joke of delicate things, still withering at the wake of storms such as yourself. Has no one cared enough to tell you that maybe, this isn't what getting better looks like? Maybe you just learned how to seem less messed up.

1
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history
and what remains of its stardust.
my sorrows expand with it; my vastness grows wider,
deeper by the day to accommodate
an uninvited houseguest.

2
i fear the act of going through my bones
like a bundle of endless, wistful letters;
some for burning.
some for throwing away.
some for breaking through
my ashen skin.

how can i be both limited and boundless —
it is no magic — just mundanely human.
the thought descends like poison eating at my backbone
until i am no more than a bygone, spineless caryatid.

3
yet again i take down the cosmos,
pick it apart
and in my hands, manage to turn it
into something distastefully prosaic —
turn it into a disassembled being.

all this wordless sadness has made me ancient. alien. unidentified.

4
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history;
i have long stopped trying to make any sense to myself and
there is no greater joy
than to be a perplexity.

amid it all, i tiptoe back and forth
between the ice-thin parts of celestine silence
and the static ringing of incomprehensible poetry.

the ground where i stand on breaks;
i float with no direction.

5
i am the space expanding endlessly; i grow wider and deeper
to make room for vaster sorrows —
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i tear it all down. tear it all quietly. inward. once and for all.
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i implode in tragic,
breath-taking cosmic colors.

And I hope you miss her so much; I hope the warm glow of her skin, and the aimless walks, and the sound of her laughter, and the blackberry kisses dipping on your tailbone were all worth it — spoiling what I'd hoped was pure.

Delicate.

Home.

And I hope it's hauntingly beautiful — the way she looked at you like you were all the sunsets I've left behind. I hope you would run out of breath everytime she smiled against your neck. I hope the mere way she said she loved you unsettled your knees. And I hope it hurts — the mere thought of her not saying it — no longer saying it. And I hope you at least loved her so much, for those stolen times that you were together; I hope it was beautiful. Magical. And I hope it felt like coming home. Otherwise, you broke my heart for what wasn't even worth it. You broke my heart for nothing.

Writing you poems seemed like a good way to break my heart.

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.

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.

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’d like to think that there is someplace where you never fell out of love with me and out of the orbits we made. And that’s why I still write — for my poems to be that place where words never failed us, where the goodbyes were never said for good, and where I could breathe in your scent at 6 am and know and feel that you were still there; that it wasn’t just another trace you left behind. At least in the poems, I could make you love me still.

At least in the poems, I could undo the fights and stitch our red strings back to each other, and look at you as if I was lost in the sea, and you were made of moon dusts and starlights.

At least in the poems, I could probably make myself enough — make my love enough for you to stay. At least in the poems.

But then again, they’re just poems darling, arranged to look like a happy ending. They’re just poems. And you’re still gone.

You’re still gone.

mental illness hides itself in the unwashed laundry spread on your bed and on the bedroom floor. it hides itself in the dust that settled on your favorite books and in the permanent markers on your powder-blue walls; it hides itself in skipped meals and in the messy hair you hadn’t washed for a week now and in the chorus of your favorite song you no longer sang to. it hides itself in your favorite constellation — in the night skies and star clusters you stopped gazing at and in those vanilla ice creams that no longer felt comforting.

mental illness is fickle, sweetie, for it hides in bad dye jobs and unopened birthday letters and in dishes piling on the sink. it hides in your limbal rings while you look at those sunsets that feel like summer storms. it hides under your skin while you stand under the shower, wondering why you even bother to bathe, or when you freeze in the middle of street, waiting for the bus to come. it hides in mornings you force yourself to get up and clean your room.

we know it, don’t we? it hides in trivial things. it hides in places people won’t look at, sweetie. it hides in proses like these

My words don't know peace. They are the nightshades all over a hunting ground. They are the bending of sunlight as it slices itself against headstones. They are a patchwork of all the cruel things I've done with my hands. They are the birds of prey, circling overhead a wounded doe. My words don't know peace — they are made of every last bit of my chaos, barely contained by my fingers. They are made of every last bit of my violence made to look nonthreatening. Gentle as the wind and tame as a field of roses — the thorns, left buried in your back.

Still, a refugee trembles, hides beneath her battle scars. She recognizes the wars waged in her skin — the cruel way they stay long after the last battle — the cruel way they don't know peace.