A man who loves you won’t call you a *****
or a *****, or say you’re crazy, or say you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to him
and ******* 2 hours later like somehow that will  undo the memories inside your brain of all the ugly words he’s ever said
So why am I stuck in a limbo of knowing this isn’t what I’m supposed to be spending my life like and staying because it’s comfortable
Maybe if I loved you less you wouldn’t resent me so much
Maybe if I was a little less of this and a little more of that you’d hold my hand in the car on the way to dinner
Why does loving you feel like muscle memory to me
Why does hating you feel like breathing
Why don’t I hate you enough to walk away
Maybe I’m afraid loving someone else would feel too safe after all of the wars I’ve fought with you

Isn’t it strange? How eventually we all become a slave to our sadness? All I’ve ever known is children full of longing and adults full of cynicism. It’s a means to survival and I recognize that. But who am I if not a child full of hope believing that eventually things will be the way I imagined them to be? Who am I without the trust that good is someday rewarded? Who am I without the fairytale ending with the man that saved me from it all? I want to believe it’s him. I know that it’s him. But who am I apart from finding my identity in the trauma of it all? Who am I if I’m not in survival mode? Maybe the idea of it all scares me more than I realize. As if I have nothing to offer if it isn’t the broken parts of me. As if I’ve got nothing interesting to say if it isn’t pertaining to the things I’ve been through. As if I’m nothing except the way been burned.

This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to prolong walking away from a man you know isn’t capable of loving you in the way you deserve. You’re going to cry. And you’re going to beg. And you’re going to become a shell of a human being for someone who leaves bruises beneath your skin, not with his hands, but with the words “*****” and “insecure”.  He’s going to kick your front door down when he comes home too drunk and you’re going to pretend he’s not just like your Father. You’re going to hold his head up while he pushes you off of him to make sure he can breathe, and you’re going to look at his phone to find the name of another woman while you’re carrying him to your bed. You’re going to break. And you’re going to tell him you’re leaving while you’re secretly praying he asks you to stay. And he will, because he always does, and you’re going to leave anyway.
This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to bubble wrap your vases and fold your winter coats with a knot in your throat. You’re going to call your mother crying; telling her you’re coming home. You’re going to tell her and all of your friends about the peace you have now with a pit in your stomach, hoping if you repeat the words enough you’ll believe them. Peace. Peace. Peace. What he never gave you. Safe. I want to feel safe. I don’t feel safe with him or without him. I feel safer here.
This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to let another man touch you because maybe they’ll erase the tattoos his mouth left on your body. Maybe if you transform into the “cool” girl no one can ever hurt you. Maybe if enough people tell you you’re ****, and smart, and too good for him you’ll start to feel like you haven’t lost anything at all. The problem is it isn’t him that you lost. It’s all the little pieces of yourself you’re trying to reignite, it’s the broken parts of you that entangled with the broken parts of him. But the broken parts of you don’t hurt the people they’re supposed to love. And another man’s hands aren’t going to rip into your skin and put stitches in the places you let him in. So you’re going to be lonely. And this is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to fall back into him, maybe more than once. Because when you’re not with him you’re romanticizing him and that’s a habit harder to break than you originally thought. Because you’ll see him, and he’ll feel so good. In the middle of all his longing, in the way he looks at you. And then he’ll yell at you and curse at you and you’ll realize he hasn’t changed at all. He’s not going to change. Men like that don’t change. It’s okay that it took you longer than you hoped to figure this out. This time might hurt more than the first. It’s the release of hope, the release of the last sliver of you that thought there might be a life where you work out. There’s not. This is heartbreak. And it is raw and real and ugly and it feels like your bones are breaking with no one watching.
This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to be alone and it is going to feel like coming up for air. You’re going to listen to the music you used to love and write words that slowly heal you. You’re going to find pieces of yourself you had buried to appease him. You’re going to light candles in your bedroom and fall asleep without wondering what bed he lies in. And in time you’ll realize you hardly think of him at all. The bitterness within you quietly releases itself as you realize his inability to love you well has nothing to do with your worthiness, and everything to do with the demons within him he refuses to face. You cannot heal someone that doesn’t want to be healed. You cannot love someone into becoming the potential you see in them. And that is okay.
This is how you’re going to heal.

Sometimes I think you got the worst of me. A product of emotional abuse, a consequence of all my longing, the effect of both trauma and growing older. I wish there had been a forewarning, that I could’ve prepared myself for the time I really met you. I was high and sad and alone and I don’t want you to think of me as sad. But I was tired and frail and full of so much anger and resentment. I never looked more like my mother. You don’t know me; the dreamer, or me; the happy girl dancing in her room to music I know you’d like. He never liked my taste in music. And I think of a way to prove it to you, to somehow show you I am more than the culmination of everything he’s put me through. but I don’t know how to make someone believe in a me they’ve never seen exist. And I wonder if my life is now going to be a product of all the hurt you saw in me. I wonder if I’ll ever actually be brave, because brave girls don’t stay when he says mean things. I think I would’ve left if you asked me to, but I know there’s only so much a person can do with someone full of pain before they’re consumed by it. I can be better, I promise.

We planned seven ways to spend the rest of our life the night we met
I borrowed your passenger seat and the inside of your palms
And I still know your hands beneath the blankets, fingers searching for mine
Los Angeles isn’t cold in June but any excuse to be closer to you
somehow 2,000 miles never tainted the longing I had to know you better

You kept a toothbrush by her sink and our phone calls a secret
Grief comes, unaware of the distance
It makes my knees weak and face hot at the thought of my ignorance
Because it wasn’t a moment of weakness, and it wasn’t a mistake
It was 6 months of loving someone who belonged to someone else, blissfully unaware of my fate
Anger turns to sadness turns to anger again

And I know the scars from biting my tongue will heal
And I know my name tastes bitter in your mouth
And I know I’m not the one to blame

The most beautiful part of me is where I’m headed, and it’s a shame you’ll never get to meet me there

I know it may be an unusual time for a love poem.
But rain is hitting the roof tiles like piano keys,
the scent of coffee beans wakes me up slowly, and somehow, you make me feel innocent again.
I wince at all of the versions of me that have led to present tense.
But somehow, I already know you won’t mind.
I won’t tell you yet about where I’ve been
but you’ll smile when I say I think winter is the prettiest time to watch things grow.
How unexpected, you and the flowers both.

If I stripped all of my prettiness away and showed you the darkest parts of my heart
would you still want to stay?
It’s exhausting trying so hard to be liked.
I want to be loved.
And for more than just the way I look naked and tangled in hotel sheets.

If I fall in love with the comfort of having you around and you fall in love with the shape of my body in your bed what do we really have?
Paint a picture of our lives thirty years from now and what do we have but dried up lust and wrinkles on our forehead?

Ours is not the rocking chairs and coffee on our front porch kind of fondness.
It’s the late nights and two bottles of wine and the dragging our feet to ripping the band-aid off because we both know where it’s headed.

I'm getting comfortable with coming home to myself
I can turn right at the stop sign onto my street and I don't miss the times you were waiting there for me
but on Sunday I realized I still have a key to your apartment
and I'm sorry for being the reason you know what losing someone tastes like
there's still two toothbrushes by your sink and I hope we're both coming to terms with the things not meant for us
you deserve more than my hesitations

I'm in the mood to remember you
legs crossed over yours;
I can't see the moon without thinking of the way it looked through your windshield
safety is your locked car in an empty parking lot
and your hands dancing on my shoulder
I trace the lines on my body the way your fingers used to
and dance across the carpet to the songs you used to play
I hope your plans and your future have saved a place for me

I prayed for something softer
I clinged to something simple
but you know me, I'm a hopeless romantic for tragedy
what is love if it doesn't leave me with bruises in the shape of your lips
and longing in the form of closure

There’s a certain safety in lukewarm love
in the thoughts I never speak, you are the first to leave
we lay in bed with only our backs facing each other
is this how it’s supposed to feel?
I’d never admit it but I stopped missing you when you’re gone
maybe it’s time we admit dependency is not the same as intimacy

my heart has been my achilles’ heel more than a time or two
but I can’t help but be grateful that after everything, the world hasn’t been able to harden it
human nature is selfish motives
but empathy and I have become well acquainted
let my tombstone read “she was soft”
let me give love like I’ll never run out
let me be your resting place
and if you need the air in my lungs
or the organs in-between my bones I’ll give you those too
and if all I ever do is make others feel loved, that will be enough for me

I dream of you in shades of green.
Forgetting you is a different kind of growing pain.
The skin I’m in may be different than when you held it, but my bones are the same and they seem to still be aching for you

And while the better part of me is certain you were never meant to be more than a daydream, I can’t bare to tell myself it’s time to stop waiting for you.

Someday, when I’m older, my daydreams won’t be daydreams anymore.
The morning sun will dance across my bare skin in my third floor apartment.
Photos in film line my bedside table and life’s so sweet I hardly reach for my phone.
We dance on wooden floors to Van Morrison’s ‘tupelo honey’ and the sugar in my coffee falls short in comparison to the love we make.

shame makes it's way in-between my sheets
and you'd think by now I'd learnt how to tell it no
it's in the too much to drink when my words start to slip
in the tendency to stay when I should've been long gone
in the begging on my knees when I should've let them leave
she latches onto the hem of my frayed jeans
and reminds me of my past
she holds my stomach upside down
and stops all of my sleep

I will open my scabs and make them a garden before they have a chance to leave a scar on me.

-you don’t get to mark my body

I find remnants of the dreamer I used to be in-between the mundane
twelve years old and my eyes had seen more than most will in a lifetime
but I loved with every fiber of my being
I loved the cities I'd never been to and the life I hadn't lived
and all the things I knew I was meant for with the sweetest ignorance for how to get there
you can find me underneath all the evidence of my surviving
my heart just as thirsty as the little ******* her bedroom floor

I miss you in ways I'm still learning to articulate
like maybe the sea misses it's purity
or your sweater misses the way my shoulders held it
the grass misses the sun's light when night falls
and in the same way the dirt on the ground wonders if it will ever feel warmth again
I miss you as though you're never coming back

Mid-day light shoulders it's way through my bedroom window
And I find spring like a letter from an old friend
She's changed, she's traveled, you should hear the things she's seen
I try my best to talk about her, the flowers she's grown and the skin she's kissed
I worry if she asks about me I won't have anything to say
I didn't mean to stay stagnant for so long, it's just I worry about falling too in love with life
I've always lost everything I've loved too much

How long did I beg for you and call it optimism
I come home and set down the baggage that has my shoulders aching
carrying you was heavier than I wanted to admit
I run the wash cold, separating yours from mine for the first time
I'd like to think I'm learning myself all over again
I'm taking back the pieces of me you used to hold

Imagine you and I, rocking chairs on a front porch after time has left it’s mark on us.
The wrinkles on your forehead tell the sweetest stories.
I hope we’ve kicked all the things that had their grip on us.
Imagine you and I, bathing beneath golden rays with our backs against the earth.
The concept of time has no hold on us.
I’ll love you long after this body fails me

how could I love myself
and hate the memories that have molded me?
my roots are planted deep beneath the earth
but petal by petal I am growing
making peace with my past
it hurts to stretch this much
but I have learned that I was made for more than just unraveling
and look at how far I’ve come, at how much I’ve survived
I’ve learned to love my dark parts even if no one else will
I’ve learned how to walk fearlessly through the fires I face even if they burn me

press your tattoos against me
until they rub off on my skin
we have built something bigger than this sadness
drink me in like a well aged bottle of cabernet
you’re my favorite escape from the madness

I can’t imagine myself without my longing
call it infatuation or blind optimism
while my suitors may have changed, this feeling seems to follow me through the milestones
find me in the dead of night, breaking my own heart
searching for a hero

all my greatest hurt reminds me of you
you ask me how I’m doing and I try not to spill my heart out in the front seat of your car
because then you wouldn’t want to see me again
and I’ve missed you for so many nights
you feel so close until you aren’t
and I always seem to find myself reaching for your ghosts around this time of day
you’re the only person I could miss while you’re sitting right across from me

I know there are nights when ghosts of your past try to creep their way in
their whispers echo until your hands begin to shake
and you’re haunted by the pictures of past mistakes
you are so much more than the thoughts that claim you
maybe you don’t miss that part of your life
but it doesn’t mean it was a loss
forgive yourself for the days you felt unworthy
and for the way you reacted to the pain
you are more than the mistakes you’ve made

to be the person of your dreams
to be less a body and more an idea
to be an unlit cigarette kissing your lips
the lavender in your coffee and the aftertaste in your mouth
your Malibu sunsets in a 70’s Mercedes
what if love is trying to break apart the barrier between what you see and what you feel
what if you close your eyes and you find yourself reaching out for me
I dream of what you’d see in me if you couldn’t see me at all

I feel most myself when I am loving you
strawberry seeds on the top of your tongue and I’ve never tasted anyone so sweet
we are made of the same skin
and I don’t worry that in another life I may not have found you, for our hiding places are the same

I like to dance in the light of all the fires I started
just so the flames can wince at the sound of my laughter
just so what once burned me can see me now

I worry I'm not as good at loving as I'd like to think
you can't put band aids on broken bones
all my doses of resentment seem to pour out onto you
and I whisper that I don't need you
with tears in my eyes and white knuckles around your fingers
I do not know how to love what's in front of me
only the ghost of the past and the fantasies of my mind

I want to be the hand that you hold in the morning hours and not just when the fear of the dark submerges you
what is love if it's only in the shadows
I want to be the lips you chase and not to replace those you once knew but because you can't imagine the feeling of yours against anothers
I want to be your resting place, the soul that you're homesick for
I want my chest to be the dwelling your tired mind finds, as if this body was made just for you

you kissed me until all of the pain evaporated
until the echoes of my past fell to a hush
quietly, suddenly the agony dissipated
like there was no room for it here
you repossessed the places my past called home
you called them yours and I called you mine

I want to be a greeter to the new seasons
to allow the new love, new sunrises and sunsets
the moon looks different from here
I gave away the old shirts and kissed the new lips and let the old worries stay awhile
change is the only thing we're promised
I made my old bed in a new room and danced in the kitchen in my same socks
I welcomed the softer skin and sugar-coated voice, the life that changed when I stopped looking back
everything shifts and I adjust
it's me, a new me, the same me
somehow different
somehow just as marvelous

yes, I believe that forgiveness should be given freely
the shedding of unnecessary hatred and the burdens that were never yours to carry
but don't allow the kindness within you to be exploited
you are gentle but you are not feeble
you have full permission to claim your boundaries
to take back your space as your own
disentangle your thinking that loving what hurts you is anything more than self-hatred

I am yours in the first month of fall when the trees begin to dance their autumn song.
I am yours when the sun smothers your cheeks and I envy the way it kisses you.
I am yours when December air pulls against your lips and sends shivers down your spine.
I am yours in the crowd of a million people and I am especially yours when the silence of your solace drives you mad.
I love you.
and I am yours.

you can taste the pain I swallowed on the roof of my mouth
I remember the night covering us like a blanket
and the sun shining light to all of our mistakes
I remember your shirt hanging off my shoulder
and the way it looked on another naive stranger, she wore it well
I remember the scent it carried, the scent of you and me
who am I without this longing that wears the shape of you?

i pray you find this message
before it's lost in the sea
i pray it finds you
and you find your way back to me

I’m beginning to forget the difference between your body and mine
hold me close to your sunlight
you are the gentlest of all the gentle things
I love you without exception

I was angry with myself
for never understanding when it is time to put hope to rest
for never knowing what love was and allowing you to define it
after a while, you learn that people are allowed to leave you
it hurts, the way endings always do
but begging them to stay hurts more
and you learn
you learn to see in yourself what you wanted them to
you learn to lift your roots from their heart and plant them beneath your own
you learn the subtle difference between infatuation and commitment
you learn you could swallow the person you love whole and you still couldn’t keep them forever
because loving someone does not guarantee they will love you back
I know lately it feels like no one really cares if you’re coming or going
this is the time to fall in love with your solace

what are thoughts and prayers without exertion
give me a guideline on how to hide from a stranger
shooting up a grocery store
but ignore the warning signs of a mass shooter
buy me a bulletproof vest to send my child to school in
because we care more about the right to own a gun than the right to protect innocents
this is not about what the rights are for, but for what they are being utilized
we cannot have compassion for the wounded without outrage for the wound itself
we cannot be okay with avoidable tragedies for the sake of pride

time fades and makes it's way through my fingers like my palm is full of rain
and I know that I don't have time to worry about feelings unreciprocated
I'll love without expectation
if equal affection can never be achieved
at least I can be the one who loves more

I made you into something you were never worthy of being
I built a castle out of ruins and laughed along while you burnt it down
someday, you'll return to those ashes and realize what you walked away from
I brush off the last memories of you and go on my way
there's no room in my future for you to seep into

love me no matter where I am
love me when I don't have it figured out, when you aren't ready
love me when I'm anxious, when I'm mean
love me because love is not timing and it is not circumstantial
I love you because it doesn't hurt
I love you because nothing scares you
I love you because you dug up the pieces of me I wanted to bury
I love you because I'll never have to ask you to love me too

This is how it starts.
It's promises that feel like contracts and the feeling that this time, you got it right.
It's parking lot confessions and I like you so much it hurts.
It's I'm scared to lose you and you aren't even mine.
It's everything that's hurt has led me to you.
It's don't get out of the car, kiss me one more time.
I don't want to sleep without you tonight.
It's sunday morning.
It's a feeling in your stomach that makes you sick.
It's disappointment and it's why didn't I see this coming.
You don't want to feel it, but you can't help but drown in it.
It's bad timing.
It's do you still think of me?
It's 2 a.m.
It's don't answer that because I'm terrified of your response and ignorance is bliss.
It's bringing up memories that I should've put to rest the day you changed your mind.
It's crossing the street to avoid me.
It's my lip burning at the thought of never kissing you again.
It's I deleted your number and you're in a different city and I hope I never feel this much again.
This is how it ends.

and he may not be pure- but I swear his love’s so holy I find redemption in his eyes

I think the most important trait is to be teachable
to understand that sometimes you are wrong
that sometimes you don't know what is best
there will be times where you are hurt, others where you are the one doing the hurting
the cards you've been dealt don't take away your ability to break someone
you cannot use your pain as an excuse to be ignorant
understand it and rise above

I think I want to disappear for awhile
to sink in to myself and return a stranger to the one’s who think they know me best
I keep searching for another person to define me because I don’t know myself as well as I’d like
and the past can’t be changed, I’ve tried that
but it’s time to start forgiving it
all I know is this longing for change
all I know is this desperation for freedom from the weight of past transgressions

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