The universe loves a bad joke.

today in biology class my teacher told us that when your heart beats faster and more irregularly, your heartstrings literally tug on your chest, causing your heart to hurt.

now I understand why my heart always hurt at the thought of you holding another girl.

but what I don't understand is that given the way you make me feel, why my heart hasn't started to bleed yet.

She's an alphabet artist
she paints in words,

from a palette of adjectives,
nouns and verbs,

the landscape she finds
in the folds of her mind

she exhibits in volumes of verse.

I fell in love with a dream,
and then I woke up.
It felt like a gut punch.
I wanted so badly for
the dream to be real,
but it wasn't.

The antonym for
dream is
reality.
And the reality
was
that she could
never love me
like I loved her.

Sometimes
The panic
Is more dangerous
Than the pandemic

i guess i always wondered
starting at the age of seven
why it was so easy to cry
but
so hard
to
breathe