"Everyone feels their emotions in a different way"
my mother had tried to explain this to me on many occasions but I never got it
It wasn't until I started loving you that I realized it wasn't so much a way, but a place
I feel everything in my chest
Like when I first knew I liked you
We were doing our chemistry homework and the smell of your skin blocked me from thinking
You told me, "I'm glad we met."
I felt an overwhelming sensation of
joy, excitement, nerves , potential, trepidation, wonder, and hope
I felt it rise to the bottom of my throat and gurgled like a stream right after the rains in May
Finally it overflowed into the eloquent and graceful words of
"oh ya.....****"

Or the first time you told me you loved me
I swallowed the words down into my chest where they bounced off each rib like a xylophone
Until I spat out the melody of
"Holy Crap, I love you too."
Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still feel them ringing

Or the last time we talked
When you said you didn't think you could give me the time you thought I deserved,
When I knew you were saying you didn't love me anymore
When you grabbed my ego by her black hair and slit her throat
Her blood dripped down my trachea and into my lungs
And I stood there drowning in my own murdered self confidence
Until I spewed out the blood soaked works "*******" onto your memory

And every night since then
I can feel my ribs caving in on themselves, puncturing my insides
The same ribs that were once the waterbed for my stream of emotion
The same ribs that used to be the keys of a xylophone
And I lie there and can breathe out nothing but the absence of you

You were as stealthy as a slow gas leak, by the time i knew i was in love with you, i had succumbed to you. You were in the drivers seat of my car lighting a cigarette with the windows up so i could breathe you in. I quit smoking so your secondhand smoke was all you would allow. I watched as you brought the cigarette to your lips and dragged in as if your life depended on it. It was your third one today and i told you that you should stop, maybe breathe me in for a second. Do you know what i would give to become second hand smoke from your lips? All you would have to do is kiss me and i would vanish into thin air, become a noble gas in the periodic table but there is nothing noble about the element of disappearance. I have been shrinking away from you ever since you held my hand in that convenience store a year ago. I'm trying to convince myself to get over you because all i am to you is someone to **** slowly through your second hand smoke. I never knew I could get so addicted to nicotine until it came from under your tongue. When you're gone, it's hard for me to breathe which doesnt make sense because when youre here my lungs are filled with your sweet black tar. But you will be gone for months when you leave in two weeks. You said you'd write to me, but written words can't carry your second hand smoke. You can't build a home out of a human being, but that doesn't mean i cant find a home in your bed.

Sometimes
it all seems so real
     Like this reality weighs heavily on my chest and I can’t breathe.
my stomach jumps and sends this cold fire throughout my body and I feel it.

I feel the world boiling in my consciousness and there’s no release that could possibly be worthy of this feeling.
Then I tell myself I'm just being dramatic and I tamp that feeling down with my fear and sadness and a yearning for eventualities.
Sometimes I’m not sure what I mean.
Sometimes I make stuff up.
But really I’m just an awkward almost-twenty year old who wants her life to be something.
Extraordinary
But.so.is.everyone.else.
And isn’t that right?
Isn’t that rich?
That we are all one.
A vast ocean of “ones”.
I’m really just a wave.
And it is alright to be a wave.
Because waves, they move.
It’s alright to be dramatic though. Why not?
I have this mind that wants out and I keep suppressing it. At least I’m pretty sure I do. Maybe I don’t. Maybe it is only on occasion that I tell it to shut up because it all is just too much.
That’s probably it.
Who am I really?
I guess I could list all of my traits and that could be who I am. Or what I have accomplished in life, and presto, you have…me.
Then there’s this consciousness that sits inside this flesh and controls it. That could be who I am. But that consciousness is just the acts it has achieved and the traits it has portrayed, is it not?
So I guess what I’m saying is.
The I that is me has not achieved satisfactory on my scale of living by which I measure my worth.

Not yet anyway

The easy way was to go frantic
& with this I can be found.
The man never knew
how he turned me upside down.

I got too tired of all the blame
looking as if I was the one insane.
For fear and sad,
things gone wrong.
Nothing like a battle
where someone might've won.

I'm not so hateful,
I think.
But gone is it
when the time was for trying.

Work as we may but we were weary
of our own faces that we conceal aside.

So we've got to know
how much we tried.
But to understand
that we'll never know
what we try to hide.

Watch me now
as I say my despise
and my energy
to try to stay wise.

My regrets to my lover,
my regrets for life;
I can never resemble
the pride
falling through my eyes.

I might have died
for it for all it's worth.
I might've believed all of it
and gone with my mind.

Far too considerate
to what you also might,
I still tried to fight,
to remember,
to feel
and then relinquish slowly
away from hurt.
From the man who's scared
to feel,
to fight
and remember
the best feeling in the world.