When you're the monster under your own bed,
you forget that you slept here too once.
That the shadows were meant for more than hiding in them.
When did you start turning off the night light?
When did your hands start dancing in your sleep?
Trailing up and down your wrist like a lost boat at sea, aching to come home from the war; You forget who you're fighting against sometimes.
You see, it's easier to blame the person you can't see then the one laying in your bones.
I tell my therapist that i'm just trying to figure out where these claws are growing from.
Digging in my skin is easier than asking myself why I have the shovel in my hands to begin with.

I stopped asking questions
when you stopped listening;
We sat in the silence we had created for ourselves
in all the words we didn't know
how to say anymore.
Are you choking on them like I am?
-it ended when you didn't miss my voice

You cooed in my ear softly, "I love you, I won't leave you."
like a breeze caressing the pine trees at night,
like the boys do on subways to girls who rattle like the leafs.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn't mean it did not make a sound.
You just didn't stop to ask before you went and cut me down.
Just because you don't ask doesn't mean I don't have anything to say.
You: Brown eyed boy, branched out fingertips, have never seen a women before.
Only something to climb up, like your hands do underneath her skirt. She sits quietly on the subway and tries to focus on her book. She knows what happens to girls at night. She's read about them all.
"22 year old women catcalled walking home from boyfriends house and killed for not responding."
It's funny how boys are so confident in shadows when they can't see their own face.
I tell myself that he's not like them,
whilst I carry around the axes from boys who have said the same thing.

I'm the type that will leave you when you least expect it
At midnight, while you're asleep after hours of making love
I'll uncoil myself from your limbs and pretend they aren't yours when I'm leaving
The moon will try to remind me of you on my walk home
How you reflected so much light onto me
No matter the countless times I tried to push you away from me, you always spun back to me like gravity
So I walk the rest of the way to my house looking down at the dim sidewalk
It's easier to act oblivious than to face what's been done
Don't we all know this?

The little girl rakes her fingertips across the condensation that builds on the windows from outside.
She carves out the sun like the grin that takes hold of her cheeks.
She lives like the rain will never touch her,
only evaporate from the warmth radiating from the dancing sun underneath her fingertips.
Mother yells she'll have to scrub the windows if she keeps it up,
as if messes can't bring beauty too;
That the sun has to shine for the eyes of others to be worth existing.
So mother rolls down the window,
and the little girl is washed away with the rain.

You're in love with her.
She's the kind of soft that makes the sun fall to its knees every evening just to get a closer glimpse.
She's everything that makes a boy believe in god.
How else could he be alive at the same time as her if he didn't?
The odds are too great for there to be any other reason that he gets to make her smile.
That kind of smile that's designed to melt boys like him that i've turned cold.
You thought I was her once.
Speaking of thoughts, do I ever cross your mind sometimes like you cross mine? Even if unintentional?
At night I accidentally love you like no time has passed.
I know it's just my unconscious mind, but while I sleep there's a version of you that loves me still.
You're a dream that I wish wasn't.
So it's the worst kind of accident you could say.
Maybe not accidental if gods real like you believe he is.
My dreams might possibly just be his way of saying "*******".

If everyone that ever loved me was in one room,
I wouldn’t even be there to see it.
What do you call that?
Not seeing what has always been right in front of you?
Having everything but grasping at nothing,

My heart melts on a hot summer day when it feels your presence.
It’s like trying to show an ice cube that it’s okay to melt,
that you can still be you, but softer.
Because you- you always knew how to make even the coldest evaporate.
I’m not saying that you should be gullible enough to fall for every boy with kind words.

So many times, I’ve become a puddle for boys with no fear of drowning.
With no intentions of asking why I create the waves I do, my tides call out your name thinking I can become who you’re scared of leaving.

Beneath my rocky surface, I don’t know who I am.
If you pretend to know yourself for so long, you become a mystery to even yourself.

So you keep calling out names of boys who make you feel like
Something, Someone, Anyone.
With no remembrance of your own name.

I’m not going to compare what we had to a tombstone
because there, you would have at least left me some form of goodbye
Something to re-read when I needed a reason to why I couldn’t find you
Where our love use to be
Hidden in the folds of my sheets; Under my porch light at 2 am
Anywhere and everywhere I've been has always been you
I can’t see the sun without pretending the warmth is from you
But at night I feel the coldness tearing away at my skin and it feels like honesty
Laying alone in my bed is like laying with a stranger or a dead carcass
I guess both can be the same  
But if I were to compare what we had to a tombstone
it would be for the reason I can’t see you anymore
Without imagining you under it
At least then I could pretend you left those words for me to find
Where our love use to be
Or never was

I let your hands explore my chest and I pretend you're searching for my heartbeat.
Feeling how it chirps for yours, like a bird calling out to its lover in the storm.
Pretending your body's intention was to keep mine warm when your mouth was leaving kisses like small fires burning across my skin.
I didn't feel the smoke in your breathe till I was burned down,
and I blamed myself for playing with fire.
I let you whisper ***** things in my ear and pretend the sounds are still the birds, which is to say I've forgotten the sound of my own voice.
So I let you build a nest within me, forgetting that I lived here too once.
What once was does not know my own body now.
Where you touched does not know how to exist without you.
Which is to say,
Who I was then does not know greedy hands like now.
Oh how I envy the oblivion.

It is said that if you fall for two people
you should always pick the second
because if you really loved the first
you wouldn't have fallen for the second
But I've drowned for my love
and I can't help but pulling you under with me
so you can know how it feels to love the first;
Longing for the surface because they've dragged you so deep
My love,
why must you do this to me
and always wonder why he saves me
when you sat at the shore not knowing my favorite color
-he knows my favorite is blue and you think it's green

every time i see you i forget you can see me too
more often then not i catch my eyes tracing your face
like if i can remember every detail i can keep you like a photograph
but just like a photograph the ink warps with time
and i have to remind myself this will someday be a memory
something i can not touch but feel
and i’d do anything to not forget this feeling
but in this frame i stand alone
cause you were never mine to keep in the first place
i’m just a girl with smudged fingerprints

I have no more tears to shed for anyone but myself.
My sadness is mine.
The moment you learn people aren't medicine,
you start getting help from your own two hands.
Nothing feels better than to fall asleep with
the person you know will be there in the morning.