A clearing in the middle of existing
I’ll be the place you’re looking up from
The dampness on your palms when you push yourself up
From the ground floor of this skyscraper life you’re scaling

I’ll be your secret, I’ll be your anything
I’ll be an envelope sealed with the wetness of your mouth
Postmarked to “this one time when I was young I…”
Just run-on sentences  that you won’t be able to finish in the morning

I’ll be your Saturdays, but I’d like to be your Tuesdays
And the scent of second-day dishes in the sink
And detergent lifting into the rafters with the frothiness of your laughter
Following your life upwards

A string of messages, constantly being cleared
I’ll be a back door to wherever you want to go
Just hands on the back of your neck
Or just the bottom of the bottle so that you might drown your troubles in me

Since I’m drowning in you

I leaned out the window and breathed in
And it didn’t taste so musty
Today it wasn’t so dry

I peaked the tip of my nose out into the world of 3 years later
And my hair dripped down onto the pavement
Fifteen stories below me
Like this September’s first thunderstorm

Dropping everything to be right where you are
I scaled the walls of this fortress in the middle of a heat spell
And if my heart is going to break then ******* it I’ll do it myself

I have a heart of graphite and secrets
And it’s been hiding in the margins of your life for so long
That I wonder what it will feel like to erase myself from you

I’ve been feeling inky and insignificant lately
Because you love me
Like doodles on the side of a skyscraper I just jumped from the balcony of

And when I hit the world below me
I shattered like glass, lethal and bright
And you ran out of me like I ran out on you

Welcome to the scent of asphalt
Here’s to something sad etched out in my penmanship
Flashing down below the skyline

Here’s to something new.

I’m lying in bed tearing my cuticles  off and rubbing my calves together
And personhood is oozing out from the cracks in these walls

I’m exhaling complacency.

I wonder who you’re thinking about when you fall asleep
And what’s dripping from the ceiling
In a room I’ve probably been in

Summer threw itself from thunderclouds
And the person I picked up out of the rainwater
Isn’t me anymore, just droplets of something vacuous

Which is exactly how you feel now
Constantly expanding and pushing me into the negative space around you
All of this is negative
All of me is empty
All this feels like is space

Infinite miles of outer space into forever

“Forever”

Like I said.
Vacuous.

I guess what you should know about me is that I love like most people drink. Recklessly. Purposefully. And I’ll pour my love into anything that can hold it until there’s no one left to hold it anymore. No one has held me in a long time.

You should know that I’m a wreck after 10pm. Because the rest of the world goes out, and I never really knew why, but now I do. Because people let the sun drag their hopes down with it and then light themselves on fire from the inside. My inside can’t be light anymore. I’m not sure it’s even worth trying. So I sit alone in dark rooms and drown in negative space. Undeveloped, and overexposed. I’m always underwater. I guess what’s why you should know I feel like I’m drowning all the time.

But you should know that I’ll love you endlessly. And that’s not a word that I use lightly. Because words are all I have lately, and even they’re running away from me too. But if you never ran away from me I’d never let love run away from you. And I would chase the sun down into the trenches and drag it back up for you, dripping in pearls and shipwrecked hope that I’d do anything to give you back.

You should know that I mean the things I say. Not all of them, but I mean this. I’ll love you until my soul breaks onto the shore, and even then it will wash up at your feet. Matter can’t disappear just like that, and you have no idea how much you matter to me.

You should know that I’m up to my ankles in tidal pools of apathy, and the only thing growing around me is you. I stopped growing quite some time ago, but I blossom when you’re around. My love grows like an algae bloom. Nice until it kills everything in its path. Sorry.

But I just want you to know that I would love you. Not effortlessly, not painlessly, but eternally. And at 4am when exhaustion finally finds me, you’ll be the last thing sailing across my mind. Because you’re the wind that moves me forward and my broken, uncontrollable self.

And when these words wash up where you are, bottled up inside of me, sink them in the ocean with whatever remains of the rest of me after I shatter it. And just know that I would have loved you.

Just thought you ought to know.

I’m writing because it’s midnight, and that’s what happens. My fingers start itching and words start running around in my neural pathways. I’m writing because I’m not really sure I have anything to say.

That’s not true though. I’m writing because there’s always something to say. There’s always something worth hearing, something worth breathing in after it rains. There are metaphors I’ve already overused, so why not use them one more time. There are metaphors unexplored at the bottom of these literary chasms I chase my mind down into and somebody’s got to find them.

I’m writing because I have nothing else to do. Because it’s midnight and the world always starts falling asleep right when my sense of security starts waking up.

I wish you could see me like this in the daytime: unafraid, that is. Unafraid of what sort of patterns my fingers will stroke out on this invalidated copy of Microsoft Word that keeps asking me to validate it. We all want to be validated. You’ll have to get in line.

I’m writing because there are words like efflorescence that roll off my tongue like new pennies dropping into wishing wells.

I guess I’m writing because I’m sad.

We’re all a little sad though, some of us just see it when we look in the mirror. We see it under our eyes and in the empty space around us. We can see it where others can’t. In the empty space inside us.

I’m writing because there’s an ephemeral “her” to be written about, and she’s not even me. She’s this sad girl who curls up in bed at night and wonders what it feels like to be loved by another human being and wonders if it will ever happen to her. She’s one of these girls you pass up and walk past without noticing. I’m writing because my whole existence notices her.

I guess I’m just writing because well… it’s what I do. It’s what I do when I’m empty, it’s what I do when I’m full, it’s what I’ve always done. It’s what I do when there’s nowhere to run to and no one to run from. There’s nothing chasing me; it’s just me in this dark room.

I’m writing because the sound of keys is nice. It’s really nice. It’s the sound of pancakes on the griddle on Sunday mornings when I was young and of heavy breathes against the curve of my neck when I wasn’t so young anymore.

I’m writing because one day I’ll be older and my sadness will be out of touch. It will be a thing of my youth when I was self-indulgent and my universe was still small enough to only spin around me. Because one day you wake up and realize all the pettiness is still there but you don’t matter to yourself anymore.

I’m writing because I do matter. I do matter.
I’m writing because I can.

I’m lying at the bottom of the universe staring upwards.
I guess I find myself here a lot.
With the sand making love to my hair and the stars running away from my fingertips so that I can never touch them, I wonder if this is over. I can’t feel the Earth’s heartbeat anymore and no one can feel me. I’m wind blowing across the speed bumps of my own body. If I scream in the middle of this forest will anyone ever heart it?
Can anyone hear me at all?
I’m drowning in plain sight just at the sight of all these things I can’t hold onto. You’re slipping away from me light years at a time.
Summer’s leaving and I’m still trying to sterilize this endless expanse of bleach white that coats my body. I think it used to be my skin but it’s your skin now and I can’t slip out of it. I’m slipping into something from which I do hope I never escape.
I’m underwater. Just down here looking up.

You were fingers drumming on the steering wheel, eyes always on the road ahead, inhaling the blend of my anxiety and your charm, exhaling gusts of songs I didn’t know I liked and ease that doesn’t belong to either of us. You were major chord progressions and eight o’clock lighting that you can’t hold under your thumb any better than the youth that you tuck into your back pocket as a precaution, only there for show, never for use.

You were self-deprecating humor that’s not real anymore by the time it’s fallen into your palms and a dose of sincerity pushed under your tongue like a vitamin you hope you never taste before washing it down. And you wash it down with everything and anything that makes you feel warm. You were the bits of everyone who’s ever made you feel warm so I sat like a radiator in your passenger seat hoping to radiate right into your core.

You were kindness on the dashboard and fears in the trunk, bumping up against the shell of your light blue disposition at speed bumps and leaned up against the walls of your mind on the straight aways. Audible under the sound of your laughter. Only audible if you were listening (I was listening) while you hummed along to words you don’t mean enough to say out loud.  But your affections sit like pennies behind the windshield, clinking together in sync with the sound of conversations you can’t help but have. You can’t help yourself at all. It’s always warm behind a wall of glass.

You were nights right before they became mornings because if time slips away then you never have to catch it. Time got caught in the space beneath your ribs until you diluted it with a love for everything bigger than you and filled yourself until you could be something bigger than Thursday nights and dog eared pages to books that no one recommended. And in the middle of a sunrise, something you could always say goodnight to, you were arms wrapped around someone smaller than you, holding onto something bigger than any of us, tapping out syllogisms like Morse code and like fingers on steering wheels.