I found a way to extinguish your fingerprints from the unapologetic blaze convincing my body to bend at the knees. I didn’t owe you anything. Forgiveness is sometimes convoluted in our heads while we bash them against our heart thumping chest, constant reminders that while we’re here on this earth we are selfish in our skin. We talked about the summer and took strides in sand we sprinkled on our heads like a heartache ending too soon. We tried stepping in footprints already bleeding in the mud, let the rain become a hurricane re-erecting the crooked we left in our bones. Whispers leaving the tingles in our goosebumps and hollowed out repression. It was the night we let the teacup shard blood stain the kitchen tiles, a Rorschach test we tricked wine and twilight into thinking was therapy for the bruises left behind our ears. You fell asleep when my fingers touched the thin parts of you, a daze of humid air lulling you limp in unsure desperate arms and honey dripping heart beat doubt. If there is anything I know about falling in love, it is that the entirety of your life suddenly disappears from memory, thought process suffocating by your cologne in backseat ambiance. I was afraid of this, of my limbs suddenly clutching to a boy I spent months never seeing despite heavy brown eyes locking on my doubt and formidable footsteps. I was afraid that the second you sank yourself into me my bones would leave it’s decaying white framed casket where I’ve let myself rot, reincarnate just to trip onto branches I’ve dropped on myself before, always stepping over but never picking up as if one day I’ll remember where I let the pieces of me stumble and break away because I’ll come back for them. One day. One day I know you’ll give me the option of stepping back into the clam shell barricade but your gentle hands will touch the lower part of my spine as if to say “Sunlight will let you breathe easy.” I dont even know you yet, not really. I just know you in sunset sunrises between shaking words and left over scrapings of our walls with dull knives and desperation clogging our throats. But in waning hours that left us too delirious to consider how we would feel in the sunlight, suddenly the world not ours to conquer, I gave myself permission to give myself an ounce of forgiveness I can hand to you now and say “For later, when I forget who I am and you’ve turned into someone who carries me when I’ve lost my way in this forest I never belonged in. It was handed to me, in car accident wreckage and razor bite rashes inflicting my courage and the steadiness of my feet. In case I forget to love you, or fall in love with you, or hold you together when I’ve scratched you with the brown thorns laying beneath us once again. Forgive me. Relinquish your fingerprints all over my frame, darling, forgive me.” Carry me home. Darling. Forgive me.

When the ocean broke,
I asked if the hurricane current in our mouths would disappear.
She told me “Hopefully never.”
I asked her why
and she replied with “because this will be the only chance
we can swim unforgivably under thunderstorm skies.”
I haven’t touched the sand
scratching the rocking boat in my throat in two years
for fear of throwing up seaweed I keep telling my friends is courage.
They call it whiskey breath and cigarettes.
I call it being misunderstood. I
forgot what summer skin tasted like
but I can remember the smell of sunscreen and her hair.
It’s a sunburned scar everyone winds up leaving on my shoulders,
they tell me to always apply spf 50
as if it’s my fault I’ve only walked on eggshells for 23 years.
No one likes a person with capabilities of expressing how they feel.
It’s like taking a shower with a tshirt on, a layer of
an outer skin that’s entirely not mine changing the
hue of my pink skin to a shade that’s “flattering” for my “figure”.
When I was a little girl the only thing I wanted was to
run wildly through the jungles of red thread carpet naked,
completely aware of how obscene I would look but **** I was fierce,
shy around everyone but myself,
unapologetic for the romance conducted in my head,
I should have ran an orchestra, leading the rhythm of my soul around the bones of Little Me.
It would have been beautiful but instead I let the
pieces of my spine
break in sprinkles dusting cupcakes
I would throw away when no one was looking.
It was like I was afraid of the thick frosting sticking to the walls of my
throat like peanut butter,
or words when I’ve lost myself in the theory and potential of someone
I desperately want to love.
The only time you accept yourself is when there is someone else
holding you at night because your breathing is matched with
someone who doesn’t understand why you reached for a
cigarette in the first place.
I do not understand myself.
And that is entirely okay as long as I am laying naked,
under July sun,
covered in Long Beach Island sand screaming I am sorry
for the little girl I had been and how very different I am now.