I don't know what scares me the most.

The loneliness or the freedom.
Thirty-one days are a lot when you have no obligations.
Nothing to complain about, I'm not used to that.
For the first time of my life I can wake up,
ask myself,
"what do you want to do today?"
And what if I don't know?
What if I don't like myself,
when I have to spend a month alone with me.
What if I'm a bad person?
Or nobody will miss me?
Forget about me and why they liked me.

What if I find out where all my pain comes from.

There is a silence.
There is a crowd of people.
There is an aching cold.
There is a massive sky.

Chapped hands on bloodied cheeks.
Blue eyes on the yawning sky.
Frozen tears on a pale face.
Fading name on shaking lips.

The bleeding sun sets.
The yawning jaws shut.
The blue eyes flicker.
The fragile heart fails.

The sky begins to fold.
Someone begins to scream.

you will be happy again.
you will have dry eyes for months on end,
walk the beach in the evening,
laugh until you ache.
it gets better. you know that. you hear that every day.
but you're sitting there losing your hair,
slicing your hips with a shard of glass
blaming yourself.
girl, you know lows but there are highs you don't know exist.

and one day, you will breathe in deep and fill yourself
full of good food and the company of people that are meaningful and real,
again. you're going to crawl out of that gaping hole, take a shower,
pay your bills, and realize you aren't as small as you feel right now, today,
this week, this month, this year.
and even though you'll also watch dear ones fall into ditches that cave in on themselves,
skinning knees and breaking your heart to pieces,
you'll also watch them live better than they ever had before and that,
that option, that light in their eyes and strength in their soul
makes it worth it. and you'll have it too.
and one day you'll look in the mirror and stop hating yourself,
stop caring if he calls or he doesn't
stop shattering to pieces the moment you step into a solitary space.

and even though maybe tomorrow you'll wake up and
have to stay in bed for another week
swaddling yourself in that familiar black carpet
you will be happy again because just like it is impossible to
stay happy forever,
just like it is impossible to ever fill that crack in your foundation,
just like you are sad now and have been sad before,
I swear, I promise,
it is just as impossible to stay miserable forever
and you will be happy again.

no one told them it was the place
that we watched the water go by -
sat, for hours,
and watched the water go by.

nobody said it was the spot where i started to move on from the boy i loved
and where you stopped caring what your father thinks.

it's the spot where we sat in the roots of trees
and smoothed sand off of purple river stones.
it's the spot where the old lumber mill had been decaying,
and where the kids would go when they were too old for the playground.
it was where the stray dogs poked around in the rubble and the lumber scraps
and where the stray cats fought and made love.

no one told them it was where we sat
and planned out our lives together -
a pair of girls with too-long legs and our hair askew
whose clothes were covered in paint
and whose hands where used to climbing the tree behind the bakery.
no one told them it was our spot,
our best-friend soul-speaking spot.
nobody said that it was spots like these
that hold the heart of our little town,
our artistic-afterthought town
with its peeling-paint coffee shops and friendly passersby.

they built concrete trees over our spot on the river,
an ugly corporate jungle.
they put grey bricks in the sand and shoveled away the purple river stones
and dug up the roots of our trees,
and now we'll have nowhere to watch the water tumble by.

no one told them it was the spot, our spot,
and no one will remember it but us.

i don’t know if you were in second
or third grade. or what your favorite color was.
i’m not sure if you liked playing dress up or soccer
or if you were an only child or the baby of six.
i don’t who you had a crush on and i’m not even sure of your gender
but what i do know, is that today you were scared because you saw white
and then heard the noise of the explosion, and the screams of the injured
but i’m not sure if had learned yet in school that light travels faster than sound.
i don’t know why you were watching the marathon, but i know that you were excited
and impressed
that all these people were running for twenty-six miles, which happens
to be the distance from your house to your
grandma’s.
i don’t know if you died squeezing tightly to your mother’s hand or
if your last breath was taken alone, while hundreds ran in a flurry around you.
i do know that when you fell to the ground, no longer breathing,
you tripped a wire that pulled out
your father’s heart and sanity.
i know that you hadn’t yet felt someone
trace their lips up the divot of your spine
and i know that you will never get to sneak out of the house at
three am to get drunk in a park.
you will never see the next president or even what your best friend will wear
on his wedding day.
and i am sorry.
i am sorry that someone was sick enough to put
an explosive in the trashcan and let it detonate
i’m sorry that your death was the product of human selfishness and greed.
i am sorry that today you had to feel a warm liquid leak from your body
and that you lost so much of it you
couldn’t bear to keep your eyes open.
i’m sorry that you were eight years old when you died,
and that you barely got a taste of the world before it was snatched out from under you.

I remember when I told you I was fat and

you told me to shut up- that I was beautiful.

I got so so angry and even though you thought it was because I hated the compliments,

I was actually confused why I couldn’t be both.

Because the most beautiful girl I have ever seen

Didn’t weigh a pound under two hundred. But her eyes

told stories richer than Belgium chocolate and

her deepest dimples, may have been those at the bottom of her spine

but her veins contained more love than all the water in the Mariana Trench.

So I’m pretty ******* angry at all the tabloids

that proclaim how to loose the extra fat, or the latest celebrity diet.

And I’m sick of “less is more”

because even though my thighs grow thick and embody the roundness of a peach

I hold more truth than the salt count of the Dead Sea

and my words weave stories that put Persian carpets to shame.

so the next time you want to make love to me

with the lights off

I’ll tell you to just **** me with the lights on. Loose the ignorance

because I will not be bullied into loosing the weight.

Have the courage to find the beauty in my stretch marks

and revel in the softness of my stomach

and I won’t be shamed into saying a smaller pant size

because I sure as hell know

that that **** piece of cake will taste better than skinny feels.