I kissed your poison,

drank your venom with a steady hand,

thinking I could alchemize it into gold,

but all it ever did

was turn my veins black.

I’ll love you until the world forgets the art of beginnings. I’ll love you until the seasons forget to change, until autumn, that old poet, stops dressing the trees in amber and gold, and leaving the sky bruised and bleeding orange. I’ll love you until summer loses its spark, until spring dies. I’ll love you until the rain forgets how to dance on windows. I’ll love you until the waves forget how to return to the shore. I’ll love you until the wind no longer hums.

I’ll love you until the clocks in my cathedral of waiting stop ticking, their hands finally still. I’ll love you until time grows tired of moving forward, leaving us suspended forever. I’ll love you until the thief time is, grows weary of dismantling moments.

I’ll love you until the rivers turn quiet, until the oceans lose their breath, and the tide no longer pulls me toward you. I’ll love you until the earth itself ceases to hold its grief, until it splits open and reveals bones, roots, things that lived and loved and died. I’ll love you until every flower withers in surrender, as though even nature knows the aching beauty of letting go. I’ll love you until the earth itself stops weeping for the dead.

I’ll love you until the sun forgets how to rise at dawn and the moon no longer remembers to take its place at dusk. I’ll love you until the moon’s pale face is no longer a witness to our sorrow. I’ll love you until the moon is no longer a silver sentinel but a pale, lifeless stone. I’ll love you until the stars begin to tremble at the thought of our absence. I’ll love you until the stars themselves collapse, one by one, until their light no longer traces your name across the vast sky.

I’ll love you until language fails me, until I no longer have the words to describe you. I’ll love you until the silence between us becomes unbearable, until i no longer hear your voice—perhaps then I’ll feel it, understand it. I’ll love you until my bones no longer ache with the hunger for you. I’ll love you until I realize I have nothing left to love. I’ll love you until I stop looking for pieces of you in strangers.

I’ll love you until the spaces between my bones no longer ache to expand, until my hands no longer remember the shape of you, until my heart no longer carries the burden of you. I’ll love you until the emptiness inside me is no longer shaped like you, until the ache finds somewhere else to go. Until I stop seeing beauty in the way things break. Until my hands forget how they bled for you. Until the salt in my eyes stings like sugar. Until my heart stops reaching for something that was never truly mine to hold. Until my heart forgets how to break.

You didn’t call it love,
but it could’ve been.
You never called it love,
but you laid the pieces down anyway,
knowing I’d try to glue them together
with whatever was left of me.

There’s a hunter in me still,

a calm and coiled predator,

watching through the lattice of rib bones,

eager for your next misstep.


I call it survival,

but the rawness of wanting

feels more like a devouring.
How many times can I trap you

before I’m the one locked in?
Before I slip into the shape of prey,

all taut limbs and trembling bones,
watery eyes and ***** fingernails,

and drown in the sharp end of the game.

You whispered like a bleeding lamb,

soft enough to hide the teeth behind your gums,
sweet enough to steal

the poison from the core of the apple.


I thought it would be different

if I drank you down slowly,

if I let my own venom lie dormant.

But I chewed through the skin of silence

and found what the wolves left behind:
the bitter marrow of your truth,

still sticky with lies.

I could leave you there,

a skeleton in my hunting grounds.

But the hunger for reckoning

stalks me.

It’s feral now.

And when you’re undone,

when your name curls in my mouth

like the peel of a burned fruit,

I will not spit it out.

Grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. An unfinished and inevitable conclusion. We spend our lives loving in real time, in laughter, in shared glances, in hands brushing against each other without thinking. And then, when loss comes, love doesn’t just disappear. It lingers, heavy and shapeless, waiting for a way to exist without the person it once belonged to. And so, it becomes grief. And no one tells you what to do with it. No one tells you where to put it, how to carry it, how to make sense of the fact that love, the one thing that was supposed to be warm and soft and good, now feels like something sharp jammed in your heart. No one tells you that love can turn into something that doesn’t fit anywhere, something that clings to you in places you can’t reach, something that spills over into moments it has no business being in. And the thing about grief, the cruel, impossible, unbearable thing, is that it has no expiration date. People like to pretend that grief is something you move through, something you work past, as if it is a season, a phase, that will eventually end. But grief does not operate on a schedule. It does not close neatly like a book after it is finished. It lingers in the cracks of a life, in the anniversaries and the birthdays, in the songs that come on unexpectedly, in the jokes you still want to tell them. It is love in its most stubborn form. Love that lingers in all the places they are supposed to be, love that does not know how to stop existing just because it is no longer received. Grief is love stripped of its softness, love with nowhere to go, love that is emptied. And that’s what makes it unbearable. Because love was never meant to be one-sided. It was never meant to be poured into a hole, never meant to exist without a recipient. I think about this a lot, how grief is not the absence of love, but the form it takes when there is nowhere for it to go, like water poured and adapting to whatever space is left behind. It’s why people keep voicemails long after they’ve stopped pressing play, why they cook a meal for two even when there’s only one chair filled. The way people say “we” before catching themselves and swallowing the word whole, pretending it was never there. Why a scent can stop someone mid-step, transport them back to a time when love was tangible, when it had a recipient, when it was something they could still give. And what is that, if not proof that love does not, cannot, die? Because if grief is just love without a home, then maybe love is the only thing in the world that refuses to be destroyed, the only thing stubborn enough to survive even when everything else eventually dies. That’s why people talk to gravestones and keep old, stained photographs and keep old sweaters in the backs of their closets and leave voicemails unheard but never deleted. That’s why people dream about those they’ve lost and wake up feeling hollow and full at the same time. Grief is what happens when love is forced to live in the past, when love is pulled from the present tense and locked into memory, when love has to exist without the reassurance of being seen, of being acknowledged, of being returned. Grief is love searching for a place to land. It is the last love letter, written in quiet tears and silent rooms, in birthdays still remembered and phone numbers never deleted. It is love refusing to die just because a person did. It is the proof that love, real love, never truly leaves. It simply transforms. I think, in some ways, grief is the most honest version of love. Because when all else is stripped away, when there is no more presence, no more reciprocation, no more future, it still remains. It is love reduced to its barest form. It hurts because it mattered. It aches because it was real. The kind that exists not for what it receives, but for what it refuses to forget. I wonder if grief is the purest form of love, because it asks for nothing. There is no expectation, no exchange, no possibility of return. It is devotion in its rawest state, love that simply is, love that continues even when it is no longer received. And isn’t that terrifying? That love could outlive the people it was meant for? That you could carry it with you for a lifetime, like a lifeline, feeling it every time you hear their name or smell their perfume in the wind or realize, all over again, that they are never coming back? feeling it with every song that reminds you of them, with every time you catch yourself laughing at a joke they would have loved, with every familiar place that no longer feels the same. That you could still love someone who is not here to love you back. That love could become something you hold in your hands with no one to give it to. People say grief is something you have to let go of, something you have to move through, like a tunnel with light at the end. But what if grief is not a tunnel at all? What if it’s a second heart, quieter but just as present? What if it’s just the cost of loving deeply, the inevitable tax on having something worth losing? And maybe that’s why it’s so unbearable, because it’s just love, love, love, and nowhere left to put it.

The flowers died on Monday;
i kept them wilted in the vase,
dried petals on the countertop
and foggy water sitting still.
i couldn’t bear to let them go,
so i dried them to keep instead
for dead flowers linger longer
than the absence of any at all.