there are parts of me that force the pain,
that let it roil in my bones until i am breathless.
it builds until i exhale it in an herbal smoke,
or until i write it in a fervent and blood-rushed poem.

there are parts of me that don't feel the pain.
these parts are healed, and most days they win out.
they pervade the unhealed parts of of my heart,
and they fill me with an ecstatic joy.

there are parts of me that remember
and there are parts of me that forget.
there are parts of me that take in what i feel and use it
and there are parts of me that gladly let it drift away.

there are parts of me that are strong
and parts of me that are not,
and mostly i only show one part or the other.
i have no in-betweens,
and that's why i am me and why you are you.
i believe that's why someone fell out of love with me
and i believe that's why i am so changeable, so wild, so full of doubt.

i am pieces and parts,
broken and lovely,
tessellated and electric and free.

I remember when loving him wasn't so wildly painful,
and I remember backseats and whispered things
and I remember winter nights and tiny joys.
I remember when I fell asleep against his arm on the way home from a dance I hadn't wanted to go to -
I remember a kiss on the top of my head,
the gentlest thing you can imagine,
to wake me up.
I remember the thousands of tendernesses.
I remember the the ecstatic joy you filled me with.
I remember I couldn't sit still when you were close by -
I remember the electricity, the wildness
you put into my limbs and the rhythms of my heart.
And truth be told these are what I'd rather remember
and this is how I'd rather it be.
I'd like to hold onto the joy and the recklessness,
the love instead of the loss.
I'd rather remember our happinesses, because they were so many.
I know your fickleness and your faults,
I know that you are in a constant state of moving on,
that you do not hold on and that you probably don't remember
but you know that I do.
I carry things with me and nights like these,
they do make me remember. They make me want and ache and they fill me with things I don't have a name for. They make me breathless and nostalgic and crippled. They make me think, write, and love. They fill me with the same abandon that you did, only quieter now and deeper, but no less beautiful.
And it's an odd thing, to remember love without feeling it,
Or to feel love in ways you don't understand because they feel so odd and out of place, being only yours. It's a difficult game and an exhausting one, and I'm struggling, still, to find my footing.
Today I remember loving you.
Later I will remember missing you.
Later still I will remember remembering,
Or maybe I will forget altogether.

and the fire smells like acid
and the moonlight looks like rain
and the ground, my feet don't feel it,
and suddenly i am filled.
with fear and with longing i am filled,
the brooding fear and the desperate longing.
the brooding fear that he won't know -
he will be missed.
he has been loved.
and what if i, at the end of it all, am only lost?
and the moonlight looks like rain
and the ground, my feet don't feel it
and i'm fearing the absence
and i'm waiting on the pain,
and i'm fearing its absence
because my heart, it's going numb,
and i swear, i can feel it,
the turning-away of feeling,
the willful numbness,
the manifesting fears.

my fears are as follows.
i am afraid of water,
of pain,
of high-up places.
i am afraid of getting stuck in one place.
i am afraid of dying in a terrible way.
i am afraid of the medical irregularities of my heart,
the condition that gives me too many beats at one time
and that will, someday, cause the beats to stop altogether.
and i am afraid that my life will be nothing like i want it to be.
i am afraid that my art is mediocre
and my poems unoriginal.
i am afraid that i will never love anyone again,
and that i will be bound, forever, by his ghost.
i am afraid that my fear will choke out my hope,
and that i will ******* myself,
and cheat myself,
and extinguish my ambition with all my doubts.
i am afraid of myself,
but i am so endlessly inspired by everything else.

last night i was filled with poetry -
filled to the brim, and now i'm not.
last night i was filled with pain and life
and with the joy of knowing things,
and now i am ordinary.
last night i wrote,
"he taught me how to bruise
before i bleed,"
on a slip of paper.
i knew what to do with the words then but
now i don't.
i have no poem to slip them into and
no storyline to follow them and
i can't even turn them into a painting.
they sit and they stay
and they stare at me and remind me
that i am not a writer, because i don't write when i most need to.

the second you tried to break into my frozen heart -
was that when you knew?
that loving me would be
the most difficult thing, the bravest endeavor.
the second you shut me out with your frozen heart,
neither of us knew
that that was the moment mine would thaw
and break
and all the fire i'd been holding back from you would manifest
as the bitterest anger
and the most acute pain.
and i wish, my darling, that i had been able to let it out to you in love,
that my frozen heart had thawed for you while it still belonged to you
and that we had been less stupid, less young, and less cold.

it's a lesson in love,
a stinging and bittersweet thing.
we lost our tenuous hold on what we had.
we did not treasure, cherish, or try,
and our similar and fickle hearts won out on us.

i won't regret loving you,
because people like us, we take what we can get.
frozen hearts are grateful
for whatever broken glimpses of love they can cheat from each other.

alison, sweet and strong,
if ever there was a person built for such a thing, it's you.
it's the goodness of your heart
and the constancy of your smile -
it is your kindness, your cleverness,
and your mother's love?
it will stretch past this life and into her next.
it will find you and it will hold you.
mothers and daughters, they are never gone from each other -
it is a bond ages and ages old,
lifetimes upon lifetimes and centuries upon centuries
and it doesn't end with someone's life.
she will find you, her mother's-light,
because surely you are what she loved the most -
it's your goodness,
your boldness, your beauty.
you strong and beautiful girl,
don't you know it?
not one step of this will be taken alone.