No drink or drug
could ever be enough
To make me forget
How much I loved.

reece*
i spent a few years being angry with you for stealing that first kiss and tainting a memory. i would never have wanted to describe that moment to my future children as it happened. fifteen and very drunk. you took the hope for a romantic first kiss, in a dimly lit room and flushed cheeks, and replaced it with being lustfully pushed into walls and cars and grazed knees.
you left me with the stink of your aftershave on the collar of my dress and two 'love' bites on the side of my neck.  

conor
when i was fifteen, you were the apple of my eye. i am still sorry that i thought you were wasting time.
wasting time. that's why the whole thing fell apart for me, i had those typical naive teenage dreams. if i hadn't had got so mad, i wouldn't have let him kiss me.
our first kiss was cute and maybe i'll tell a white lie and describe it to my kids as mine. door step, holding hands, porch was lit.

jamie
you found me at the time of my life that i thought was bad. but now i see, it was simply the calm before the storm and that the worst was yet to be.
i was not allowed to even bring up your name on a social networking site without a backlash of hate.
maybe we crave for the forbidden, it originated from the garden of Eden but i do wonder if that apple had tasted as sweet as your kiss.
i can't tell you how much i enjoyed those very few weeks with you, you helped me to realise i deserved so much better.
                            now I've found it
we kissed under a staircase

billy
oh, how i wish your name was not on my list.




tom
maybe I am biased because I am currently irretrievably in love with you, but our first kiss was my favourite.
the very touch of your skin almost made me cry because you are just so soft and I was not used to a boy being so nice.
and how strange it is, to be so happy in your presence.
how strange it was, to spend the entire day in London showing you off.
I could not, for the life of me, recall one single face
of strangers we walked past on that day.
I tried to do things properly, no kisses on the first date, but it's hard to say no when you lean in and grab my face.
and during the kisses after that one, you were worried would ask my why my hands would shake and my lips would tremble
and I was sorry, but sometimes things that have been smashed clatter around a little

and I know it's a long shot,  but I have to ask,
if our first kiss could be my very last.
train station goodbyes, the best and the worst.
but every kiss with you is as enchanting as the very first.

she was as see through as her
fish-netted leggings.
she sat on the quad with flowers tangled in her braids
and a book of poe on her lap.
she told me about how his voice at 3am over
the phone sounds like god, and how his eyes
look like jesus; she was a catholic girl, raised
with a bible in her right hand, and a handful of experiments
she thought up to change the world when she was seven
in the other. she told me about the cracks in between
his fingers, and how they resemble the roman roads;
not perfect, but they all lead to his heart. sometimes,
she likes to picture the way her right eye
twitches when he kisses her, and then she
starts to wonder about him and how he
treats her similar to her father but the words
to describe this aren’t coming out of her mouth fast enough for her to think of the next sentence.
“tell me about you,” she asked.
i write poems in the dark hours of the night you talk to him;
i am envious of whatever faults you find in his fingers.
i never knew god, but **** i swear i met him in your laughter.
i see your teeth in my dreams but when i wake up, you’re still
talking to him at 4am.
i memorized the way your foot lifts off the ground when you’re about to
take another step, it’s hesitant but curious, similar to the
way i want to tell you all of this but instead,
you sit on this bed of snowbound grass
sharing stories of poe and not enough of what makes your
eyes twitch, or what faults you can find in me. open your hand,
place it over my black heart, i don’t remember the last time it turned red.

i am giving up on you.