I know it’s wrong to beg for someone to stay
so what if I just asked politely
or what if we said the same goodbye a hundred times and we never actually reached the part where you walk away
you have to think that we were lucky to know love like this, even if just for a moment
I don’t know how to grieve the loss of you
I don’t know how to stop loving your ghost

He smelled like a bar I was too young to get into and marlboro lights
just for a while, I wanted to live something new
to wake up to pancakes in the morning and kisses on the cheek
instead of with my heart broken from the night before and a sinking feeling in my stomach
I hated you for the things you chose over me and the love you never gave
I hated you because a daughter should never have to beg her father for a relationship

there are days where I worry I have done nothing but tangle myself in regrets
I keep writing poems about my past hoping to cleanse it out of my system
because most days I feel more shame than growth and I forget what all of the rain was for
I was almost better, but almost doesn't count for much
I'm tired of watching the sun rise and fall from the same place hoping somone will save me from myself
my thoughts are so loud I'm burying myself in them
but something inside of me has survived all of the suffering and still wants to carry on
something in me knows that this is not the end

did you know that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe
at least 300 billion stars in the milky way
that a blood vessel system could stretch over 60,000 miles
that the probability of us existing at all is about one in four hundred trillion
that the probability of us meeting is zero, because the set of things that could happen in our lives is uncountably infinite
and I don't know if there's such thing as souls destined to meet
but I do know we could've lived a thousand lives and we still found ourselves here
there's something holy in the hand you hold out of the 14 billion others
and even if the ending is not what we predicted, I'm so lucky to be known by you

I'll spend the rest of my days kissing your smile
and thinking of you while I'm folding my clothes
love is practice, a verb
love is the patience you've given without expectation
and when I questioned you, when I wondered if the stars really aligned for us
you showed me that love is a choice
it is not begging someone to stay, but knowing they will everyday
it's never an "you owe me" or being held against the weight of my wrong-doings
it's you and me, in all of my realizations and things I've yet to figure out
it's figuring them out together

I will not exhaust myself for the sake of making ends meet and let my dream wilt away
I refuse to settle, to find myself engrossed in a mundane life
in a town where the people are all pretending to not be miserable
I have spent too many minutes trying to fit the mold of what I thought I had to be
I want to believe I can come back to myself
like an old friend at a corner booth, caught in city winds
a foreign place but a feeling all too familiar
I'll meet her in a coffee shop, writing with ink stained fingers
this is the me I've always liked the most

I loved your skin more than my own and for that I failed myself
do you still think of me?
teach me how to love in fragments instead of with the whole of me
teach me about ill-timed affection and confessions given right when I begin to let go
I’ll teach you what it’s like to feel you; in my skin- in my head
I want to be unbothered by you, but my heart and mind have never reached a compromise
do you still think of me?