I looked at myself through an oracle’s mirror;
At the person I was, have become and one day could be…

I saw a little seraph girl with a crooked halo
Resting on her devil horns.
Her tired heart and brave mind
Were curious yet guarded.

That day I saw myself  
With every scar
Every fallen tear
Every smile
And every milestone.
I peaked through my wings
And saw the devil They never wanted
But the angel for whom I still fought for
On the darkest nights
And loved on the brightest mornings.

I have become a paragon of imperfections and flaws.
Transformed into a tesselation
Of loosely sutured calamity weaving
Through the complexities of my benevolence.

And yet…

Beyond myself,
I saw the world in its blackened beauty
Reflected so wondrously
In shades of good and evil
And wrong and right
And wrapped ever so tightly in adventure.

My golden apple waiting just outside of Eden’s gates.

Shall I take it?
And be locked out of my garden forever?

The cherubs will be forlorn,
And the demons may even shed a tear,
And the hell whose flames I’ve kept so tamed
May reach out and dance across the garth.

It'd be great
To not feel stupid for caring.
It'd be great
Not to be put on top of the world
And then left there
On
     A
        Very
                Thin
                        Tightrope...
It would be amazing
To have something more
         C o n s i s t e n t
Than water
And more solid
Than anything known to man.
It'd be breathtaking to have my breath taken
And returned
Rather than left gasping
For an air that
Only
        Ever
                Felt
                       Okay to breathe
With you.
But it would be tragic for me
To write these words with an unbridled hope for
Those great things
         And those amazing things
     And those wonderful things
               And those breathtaking
Things.

All because its a comedy
To think you care.

What if I don’t leave a note?

Would you lie awake at night and wonder what pushed me over the edge?
Would you close your eyes and think of which of those words—
The one’s we were always told could never hurt us—
Found it’s way so deep into my heart that I started to crumble?
Would you curse the world for the sticks and stones that broke all my bones
and kept me frozen in place unable to run from the pain?
Would you feel disgust in the ground you walk on for swallowing me down 6 feet below?
Do you think you’d scream at whatever God we’ve created in the sky that allowed such evil to exist?

What if I never tell you which goodbye would be our last?

How would you remember it?
Would you start to realize the fear in my voice,
Or the uncertainty in my actions,
Or the steady decline of my broad smile and sparkling eyes to nothing more than frowns made of coal?
Would you know?
That I was ready to slip into the darkest parts of my being and never returned.
Would you know and deny it because you thought I was strong?

What if I leave you a map?
A map of all the places I’ve been, the place where I am, and all the places I once wanted to go.
Would you walk through the world I couldn’t handle for me?
Would you want to breathe the air as I once did
Or are you too afraid it’ll just crush you too?

So many questions left to ask and left to answer,
But in a world where words move mountains and build faiths and break hearts and mends them…
Questions are better than tears.

Because sweetheart,
If I write a note it’ll break you and I don’t want to show you the ugly side of a world you see such beauty in.
And I cannot bare that never ending phone call where neither of us want to say goodbye and hang up,
Because we both know what would come next.
And if you walk in my footsteps the you are walking down a minefield with no proper preparations,
So even what you feel is the right step could mean your life and that is not a burden I wish to pass on.

So, if I don’t leave a note,
Or a map,
And I don’t tell you which goodbye is our last,
Do not resent me because that’s a pain that not even death can stop.
I cannot die leaving my hurt behind
On the shoulders of the only beautiful thing this world has left.

I don’t think you get it.
I don’t think you can grasp how hard it is for me.
Every morning I wake up
And every place he touched me burns and hurts as if they are fresh wounds
As if I’m a scarred soldier returning from a war I used to think was love.
I felt ***** and disgusting.
I felt impure and rotten.
I hated myself more than I even thought imaginable.
So I romanticized the feelings of hurt and I exposed the scars on my body as if they were a sight to be seen.
All of them.
Every inch of me was not mine
Every breath I took belonged to another.
Every single moment I lived was for someone else’s pleasure.
Because that was my worth.
He took the one thing I had left that belonged to me.
I was broken but I couldn’t bare to admit to what had broken me.
I couldn’t handle accepting that I fell in love with the devil.
“These are not bruises,” I would pronounce proudly. “They are marks of true passion.”
I turned pain into something so beautiful that the word ‘love’ was simply not enough.
It was meant to be.
I told myself that everyday because you told me that there are no accidents.
“God will put the right people in your life,” you assured me.
So I believed in those words and told myself I was wrong for hurting and that I loved him so it was fine.
That was the spring when something in me died when it should have bloomed.
And that was the summer when I was too scared to fly any closer to the sun,
So it reached down and set me ablaze instead.
That was the year I could no longer believe that a God could exist among such terrible things.