Text her. Send her messages that she won't know how to respond to. she'll read them and put her phone down. Stare at the read receipt for hours until you realize she's not picking the phone back up, she doesn't have anything to say to you.

Eat lots of chocolate. It has serotonin in it, the happy chemical. When you cuddle with her, your brain releases oxytocin. As long as you eat enough chocolate (and throw it up) you won't miss the oxytocin one bit.

Bleed. When she tells you that she cuts herself, cut deeper. This is guerrilla warfare now, and for every shot fired you must fire back.

Read your messages. Laugh at the nicknames she used. "Princess". "Baby". "Darlin". You were never her princess, never her baby. She was the child and you were merely her plaything.

Make art. Write dumb poetry about falling in and out of love, take photographs of your ****** thighs, paint a picture using only shades of red. Let her figure out what all these things mean.

Drink. Green tea, *****, over-priced lattes. Stay up all night crying. Wear stilettos. Sit in art museums all alone and wonder if being a starving artist is as much fun as it sounds. Take long showers and harmonize with your favorite songs through your tears. Use heavier, blacker eyeliner. Spend time on yourself. Adopt a cat. But most of all, remember this:

You can only love one person. Choose yourself

She’ll be lovely. There will be spaces for you between her ribs. Your left lung is smaller than you right lung to make room for your heart, but there’s all kinds of room in her body. Her kidneys and liver are failing and soon enough they’ll be gone to make room for your love.

2. She won’t ever be expensive on dates because all she’ll order is a salad. You’ll never have to worry about not having enough money (for dinner at least). You’ll have to worry about emergency room bills when she passes out, but she’ll never ask for anything else. All she’ll want is ***** and sleeping pills.

3. She will always put you first. She’ll love you with all the love she should have kept for herself. She’ll make you hot chocolate and stay up until 3 AM while you’re crying over her. When she makes you cry because you just want her to see herself the way you see her, she’ll be there with cold hands and tired eyes. She’s dead, she’s exhausted, all she wants is a good night’s rest. But you can count on her to be there.

4. She will tell you that you are perfect. She’ll believe it, too. Everyone around her seems to be perfect and she’s drowning under the weight of mediocrity but it’s okay. She’s okay. She won’t understand that all of us are swimming and most of us are drowning.

5. She’ll always have scissors and pencil sharpeners on hand. The knives in her kitchen are always sharpened to perfection and if you forget your razor at home, it’s ok. She has extras in her closet.

6. She’ll ******* any time you want. As long as you don’t look at her while she’s getting undressed. She’ll be used to the sensation of knives but it’s a different kind of pain when you look at her. She will want to be beautiful for you. She’ll love you until she can’t breathe anymore. You’ll make her feel beautiful for the night but when she wakes up she’ll still think she wasn’t worth it.

7. Date a girl who hates herself because she’ll love you.

She’ll be lovely. You’ll be able to count the spaces in between her ribs. She’ll have thin skin and it’ll be so easy to drive her crazy with just a single touch. It’ll be easy to make your mark on her, too. She’ll bruise easy and love it. She’ll think it’s beautiful.

2. She won’t ever be expensive on dates because all she’ll order is a salad. You’ll never have to worry about her ordering an expensive steak. You might have to worry about emergency room bills when she passes out, but she’ll never ask for anything else. All she’ll want is ***** and sleeping pills.

3. She will always put you first. Your needs always come before hers because she was raised “God first, others second, I am third”. She’ll make you hot chocolate and drive to your house at 3 AM with pizza she won’t eat, even though she’s dead tired and all she wants is a good night’s rest. You can count on her to be there.

4. She will tell you that you are perfect. She’ll believe it, too. Everyone around her seems to be perfect and she’s drowning under the weight of mediocrity but it’s ok as long as you know how perfect you are.

5. She’ll always have scissors and pencil sharpeners on hand. The knives in her kitchen are always sharpened to perfection and if you forget your razor at home, it’s ok. She has extras in her closet.

6. She’ll ******* anytime you want. As long as you don’t look at her while she’s getting undressed, she’ll love you until she can’t breathe anymore. She’ll smile as you kiss her thighs because you’re the only one that makes her feel beautiful.

7. Date a girl who hates herself because she’ll love you.

I’m all sharp edges and she’s contours
hills, valleys
soft skin on loud bones

She’s turning me soft but
she says she likes me better that way.
she doesn’t want ribcages, thigh gaps, logic
she wants feelings, hushed whispers, curves

she’s slowly teaching me that skinny girls are
nice to look at but they can’t hold on when you push them away
.
She refuses to realize that sometimes
some things are better left unsaid
.
I am afraid and she’s warm and
i’m shivering inside and out.
i’m bruising, perfect shades of purple
my neck and my knuckles and my heart

i don’t even know what i wanted but it’s
too late now she’s
breaking me.

i always wanted to be in love
but not like this.

I tried to write poetry about pushing her until she couldn’t breathe
about the way her soft lips opened against me and how
she bit my neck even when I begged her to stop
I tried to find the words for all of those things but
I realized that she had written the poetry for me
she wrote it on my neck in shades of purple
and on my back in little streaks
she wrote poetry with the wrinkles in my sheets and
the knots in my hair and the
taste of her in my mouth.
Sometimes poetry isn’t always on paper
Sometimes it’s on people.