Girls like me are taught to treat our bodies like metaphors, we are taught that we can only be desired if we are oceans and hillsides, if we are Septembers and sinkholes. They paint us, all sunset eyes and nicotine, hoping to color us in with their washed out words, so that maybe we can mean something. We are taught to fold into ourselves, to shrink our waists and our voices, that being small minded will compensate for the space that we take up. We are taught to apologize for the space that we take up. Girls like me have to be thankful to the stranger who comes and dares to want us, as if we’re only worth our weight in love poems, as if he’s doing me a favor with his wandering hands. Girls like me fill our heads with shipwreck and sorry’s, hoping that this time it’ll be different. That this time, for once, love might be blind. That this time, for once, we can be enough. Girls like me are afraid of being enough. Because maybe if I think of my body as anything more than a graveyard, your ghost hands will find somewhere new to rest.

I painted x’s between the stair steps of your rib cages and glued o’s to the roof of your fireproof mouth, keeping just enough so that when the economy crashed I could say I didn’t give you everything. And your eyes were windows, not to look into but to look out of, and your hands spelled out ‘welcome’ in scar tissue, in heart lines. I know I spend too much time drawing pictures on postcards and that when you argue politics all I hear is poetry, but I’m trying hard to fill the vacancy that you have offered. I never understood a longing for home, because I never sat still long enough to have one. But, you. You and your concrete and your skeletons, and your house of wild cards are starting to look like that anchor. I guess what I’m learning is that I don’t get homesick for places, only people.

Born in the landlocked month of February, somewhere between tragedy and Tuesday, the tornado sirens matched her first cry. They called her vague and passionate, giving her adjectives where others gave affection. But still, I saw past pretense, and I was lucky enough to know her. To see her through green glass lenses and stretched allegory, to witness the wind behind her coke bottle eyes. She spoke in questions, in coffee shop conversations, clinging to claustrophobia as if maybe it could save her. Maybe I could’ve saved her. But still, I remind myself, I was lucky enough to know her. When she spoke, her hands would shake, calling evidence to the unadulterated genius lurking inside her borrowed veins. If nothing else She was brimstone and birdsong, Sunday morning service and burned bridges, a mystery to all who tried to love her. She left on an insignificant day in July, when the Sun pushed down on bare skin and our blood mixed with mercury and halogens. She didn’t say goodbye. They carved a meaningless bible verse into her headstone as an afterthought, and the pastor spoke of ‘better places’ and ‘peace at last’. They danced around the word suicide, as if that made her anything less, only sending her to heaven out of guilt. And me? Well, I was lucky enough to know her.

You told me once, in the wrought iron of January, that I saw a different truth than others, that my reality hid somewhere between vertebrae and yellow brick, a quiet disconnect that had long gone unnoticed. And as you spoke, the tobacco stained sunset and the turquoise of our town collided; a fire soaked skyline of awful honesty. That night, I prayed to dead stars in the fluorescent language of the lost. My apologies mixing with the nicotine and lips begging for time I did not deserve.