It makes me

so sad

to

love you.

Screaming rings out through the glass panes
of the house across the street.
And it sounds just like them.
The nights she spent screaming about
the mistresses
and the nightmare she felt was her life.
Before he would leave.
He always left.
Well, mostly.
Some nights she would come into our rooms,
****** us out of our tossings and turnings
and run.
But only one of us.
She only ever took one of us.
And we would drive the twenty minute ride
to Martha's house,
where I,
or he,
would pretend to sleep on the couch,
while she drank,
and commiserated,
about how he didn't try.
And he didn't care.
How the **** from the emails,
didn't care that she was destroying a family,
or a life.
Or whatever the ****,
she thought she was fighting for.
But mostly,
most nights,
it was him leaving.
It was the sound of the door slamming,
and the engine of his '93 Volvo starting up
in our dirt driveway
as he disappeared into the night.
And I never understood.
I never understood why he left,
every time.
That is,
until the day came,
when I, myself, started leaving.

It
still
rains
when
I
miss
you.

I’m going to miss you tonight.
Every single part of you.
Every last ounce of who you are.


And tomorrow,
well tomorrow...

I won’t.

What the ****
am I doing.
And why can’t I
quit you?



...why don’t I want to?

i'd wait around
all night
for you to
come around
lay your sweet head down
upon my chest
and breathe with me.
just for a little while.

let me love you.

and i don't think i've ever felt this way
for quite some time...
and i'd let you
i'd let you
sink deeper into me
while you let sleep take over you
and let my heart consume you.

let you love me.

I do believe,
without intention,
that I have somehow,
in some way,
become undeniably,
enchantingly,
horrendously,
addicted to you.

Why are you so sad,
For a man that let you go,
So easily,
So simply.
A man that said,
“We will never get this right…”
And left with no other reasons.
Why do you mourn him?

Because I loved him
In all the ways he thought
He shouldn’t be loved.
I loved him in ways he will realize too late,
If ever at all.

But, I do not miss him.
I miss the way I allowed myself to love him.
I miss the way I fought for him.

It makes me sad to love him.

But only because he will never realize
The ways in which I did.

I fell in love with a boy, once.
A boy with brown eyes.
They didn't sparkle.
And they didn't gleam.
They were brown.
Simple, ordinary brown.
And this boy was an ordinary boy.
He didn't speak beautiful words.
He didn't sweep me off my feet,
or sing me love songs.
His kiss didn't send fireworks through my veins.
Nor did his touch make me shake.
He was simply ordinary.
I was never undeniably addicted to him.
Never felt my heart in his hands,
or felt his soul in my chest.
He was what he was.
I was what I was to him.
We were what we were,
at that moment,
when neither one of us wanted to mean something to someone else,
when neither one of us wanted to feel.
We, as we were, were ordinary.
They will never write love stories about us.
And he will quickly forget about me once I am gone.
Because to him, I was ordinary too.
He never dreamt of me.
I was never what he felt he's been missing all this time.
I was just a girl with blue eyes.
Blue eyes that didn't sparkle.
Eyes that he never thought to gleam.
Ordinary blue eyes.
But now and again,
part of me thinks that maybe he fell in love with me too.
Some moments I think that maybe,
well maybe the fact that we didn't say much was okay,
maybe it was okay that we were ordinary.
I always thought I wanted this extraordinary love affair,
filled with this insane, violent, addictive passion.
Where we hated each other,
yet we couldn't survive with the other,
where we couldn't breathe without the other's breath.
I thought I needed someone who would take responsibility
for whether my heart was capable of beating or not.
But then I fell in love with a boy,
a boy with ordinary brown eyes,
who spoke ordinary, quiet words.
A boy who touched me in an ordinary way,
who took ordinary breaths, at even intervals.
I fell in love with a stupid, ordinary boy.

I don't cry anymore.
Not since I cried for you.
Nothing seems quite worth it, since you left.
So I don't cry anymore.
Just on that one day...
that seems to roll around a little faster each time,
as the years continue to mount since the sky came crashing down.
The day the war ended,
and the white flags began to wave.
The day all the songs suddenly played out of tune.
When the phone call came,
that was mostly silence.
Just two people connected by the absence of speaking,
while we attempted to comprehend the news.
They had found you. You didn't make it.
So I cried.
But, your sleeve wasn't there to wipe my eyes on
anymore.  
And when the anger came,
you weren't there to say my name the way you always did,
when I was angry with you.
There were no more 2 am phone calls,
there wouldn't be any again.
And I didn't look at the passenger's seat of that red Subaru anymore,
because you wouldn't be there rolling your eyes
while you serenaded me with that one Dave Matthews's song...
The one you hated,
because you hated all of them,
but I had insisted that it was "our song" one night at 4am,
when I told you that it made me think of you, and us
and everything.
There would be no more arguments that always ended in "I love you"s,
there would be no more fighting for each other,
fighting to love each other,
fighting to figure out if we mattered to anyone other than each other.
So they laid you to rest on a rainy Saturday.
I didn't go.
I like to think you understood.
Because the war was over,
and I was tired,
and I never wanted to remember you like that.
I was a coward.
You deserved better than that.
I just sat in my apartment,
cried every single tear I had ever been destined to cry,
and I didn't cry anymore after that.

I honestly thought that without you,
I would die.
Not die,
in the literal sense,
that’s far too dramatic.
I don’t want to admit that without you,
I couldn’t survive.
But I thought…

well I kind of did think that.


I thought that my heart wouldn’t beat without you,
that my breathing would become shallow and weak.
I thought that the sun would burn out,
and the sky would come crashing to the ground.
I expected time to stop,
noise to cease existence.
I thought…

well I thought that without you,
everything would just grow quiet.
Lonely.
Sad.
Quiet.
But it didn’t.
Nothing changed.
Nothing stopped.
The world survived you.
So,
quietly and bravely,

I decided that I would too.

It's 2am in December and my windows are all open.
Every
one.
Heat off.
Clothes off.
Trying to remember what it's like to feel..

I'd smoke another Newport, but I've smoked so many
that it hurts to inhale normal air,
especially the crisp winter air
that's pouring into my apartment,
sleep seems futile..

There's an empty bottle of cheap pinot lying next to me,
a half-finished PBR, from the thirty I bought myself
and I haven't thought of you in a while.
Hello there...

My mind wanders to that alleyway in the heart of Columbus,
dark and deserted,
the sounds of lovers off in the distance,
my boyfriend calling my name, searching
but I can't hear him.
I can only hear you...

You see love, I haven't thought of you,
haven't let myself back to that place
because I met a nice boy,
who told me nice things,
asked nicely if he could touch me, in nice places
before he did so,
and it was nice...

So I waited and he waited,
took things slowly for once,
convinced him it was worth it,
that I, was worth it,
so when he told me, it was beautiful
and I told him right back.
it was beautiful,
"I love you"...

And don't you dare question me, love
for I love him,
because he thinks I'm wonderful,
hasn't seen the scary parts that I'd showed you,
doesn't believe I'm as broken as I say,
He tells me I'm perfect...

But yet,
that night in Columbus, Ohio still haunts me,
the night you rode a bus for sixteen hours to get to,
that moment we're screaming at each other,
I'm telling you that I hate you, and I know you've never cared
why are you even here? I HATE you...!

You kiss me.

Kiss me...
Like your sole purpose in life... was to kiss me.
Right then.
Right there.
Like you'd been waiting forever..

You kiss me
like you were created by God
for the final moment
where your lips would dance with mine,
and fireworks would fly
from your fingertips
as they brushed across my cheeks,
turning tears into vapor,
unspoken truths into song,
longing into love,

you kissed me.

Kissed me, and saved me from being stone..

That night, you told me everything I'd ever longed for you to tell me.
Told me about your terrifying family,
and the reasons you were better off being alone.
I wept into your arms as you told me you loved me,
that you had given me every single thing you could,
how you were sorry it wasn't enough.
And I told you all the sad things I'd lived through,
all the boys who never learned my name,
all the nights I'd never had a home,
the day I wished I was dead..

And you stroked my hair, told me not to cry,
wiped the tears from my cheeks,
while I told you that all you had to do was ask,
that I'd come back for you.
All you had to do was tell me to come back, for you.

And that night,
in that tiny apartment, 700 miles from home
you made love to me,
kissed me softly,
whispered sweet nothings until I fell asleep on your chest...
You became home, my love,
You were my home.



The next day,
you got on a Greyhound bus back to where you came from.
Didn't look back.
And I went back to that little apartment,
never looked back down that alleyway,
and once more,
became stone.