Mikaila

Mikaila Oct 2015

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I am next to you
In the velvety darkness.
I can hear the city breathing
From just outside your window,
Breathing like you.
Your soft, rhythmic sighing blends with the sounds of life drifting in from the street
And it's like you're the same,
Uncontainable, indescribable.
The light kisses the soft lines of you
And your lovely, wild hair cascades down the pillows.
I feel...
This is what I want my nights to be like.
I want to know you're safe, sleeping beside me, I want to feel you here-
The smoothness of your skin pressed up against mine intermittently
The way I can feel your heartbeat through your chest.
You're so present, so real and warm and... Mine,
And I want to kiss you dizzy
I want to map every inch of you with my hands,
Always longing to be closer.
But I just lie back into the pillows, feel you breathe.
I wonder, are you dreaming?
Behind those green eyes
What worlds are there, playing out the musings of such a soul?
Ah, the familiar feeling-
I long to know you
Every part of you
Every shame and insecurity you are worried I'll find
I want to find them and love them all
With the same tenderness that I love your voice and your lips and your passionate mind.
I want to be close to you in ways I don't even know what to think of.
You turn, mumbling, and reach for me
And something in my chest
Rises and falls all at the same time.
I never know
In this life
How long I will get to be happy
But this is forever
This right now
This
Is something that I won't come back the same from
No matter what happens.
So safe, so tender...
I could be anything with you.
I could grow into anything, nourished by your gentle glow.
I long for you
And I long for the person I will become the longer I spend in your arms.
Change me.
Make me.
Heal
Me.
For all my fears that you will tire of my gifts
And of my constancy
For all the scars I bare and all the times my world has ended
When I look into your eyes I cannot fear you-
I am too alive.

Mikaila Oct 2015

"Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the DESIRE to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

I think of you always. You

Linger in me, like a melody, a heartbeat,
On and on... Oh what if I say it and you just
Vanish? And I am left here,
Empty... Oh, but what if

You don't? What if you are waiting too,
Openhearted but shy, cautious-
Unable to confess? Afraid, like me, to fall.

#love

Mikaila Oct 2015

Hold My Hands, Hold My Heart

Have you ever heard a song
So sweet that lyrics would corrupt it?
So pure that you hold your breath
Afraid you'll shatter it just by sighing?
It's a torn feeling, an unnameable feeling, the description of which can only lead you in circles
Hopelessly tangled in the desire to express it.
It is something so excruciatingly, frustratingly ineffable that you can't even move, frozen in awe, locked in a complex, pressurised longing.
Something
So achingly lovely that just the thought of it
Pulls tears from you in diamond threads
And makes you, briefly, a shimmering echo of it,
Lit
From inside.

I say this
Even though I know that trying to describe that feeling
Is like trying to grasp at mist
I say this
I say it because
I felt like that in your arms.

I looked at you
In the half-light
And just for a second I saw you fully, in a new way.
The light loved you.
It slid along your skin like it came from the stars
And not from a bedside lamp propped against the wall.
You were so smooth, so soft, tendrils of hair escaping their pinnings and following the long lines of your neck.
Your eyes gleamed through your smile,
And all the sweetness and wit and beauty behind them,
All of that that I could touch, all that art looking at me in that moment, like having a symphony play for just you,
That soul under that skin, a whole galaxy of loves and hates and dreams and insecurities coursing through you...
And me
An inch away
Less
Pressed up against you like a parallel universe, so near and so sacred and so shockingly tangible-
The heat of you, so solid but so pliable next to me, so much a part of me that nothing about me could feel empty.

I couldn't breathe for joy, suddenly.

You could have been the moon, just then,
Or a goddess, like one of those smooth, white, subtly glowing statues in the museum halls,
Women I always imagined came alive at night and basked in the starlight,
Absorbing it to throw it back upon the world when day broke.
Your fingertips on me traced patterns
And I wanted them to touch me deeper
Wished my body was more my soul than flesh can be
So that I could feel yours in your hands.
It was too much!
It was
Not enough.
And I laughed, hid my face in your neck, felt your pulse there and how fragile your collarbones were.
I wanted to seep into your skin like rain.
I tried to shrug past it
But the feeling grabbed me by the shoulders and shook the words out of me,
And suddenly I was cheek to cheek with you,
Confessing...

After that the way I touched you changed.
I don't know if you felt it,
But I did.
It had been coming, sneaking up on me, all that day.
In my arms, beneath my palms, I held something so unutterably precious
Whenever I held you
And I knew it fully then, unable to unfeel it.
It made me tender in a way that pierced my heart
In a way that scared me
Because it felt like why I'm here.

If someday I get to tell you I love you
I will tell you that it was that moment when I knew for sure I would.
That moment when it all became so crushingly, beautifully real to me-
When gravity shifted, and you began to pull me instead.

Mikaila Oct 2015

Leah

I wonder what's under your skin.
Sometimes
I see the glitter in your eyes
Of hidden things
Like the shine of silver minows in deep water
But then the sun comes out and blinds me
And I've lost the trail
Of that starlight that I know drags its soft fingers through the dark corners of your heart.
I want the long shadows it casts.
I want the complicated, messy figures it throws up on the cave walls of your soul,
I want their unabashed wildness,
I want the savage way they will never keep still in one form.
I want the way they scare you and the way they thrill you.
We hide
So much in this life.
We hide from the world.
I will show you every edge of me
And I will map your edges
With tender hands and gentle words,
And awe.
I want in
To whatever makes you be.

Mikaila Oct 2015

To My Pack

I crawled away from you
The way a dog deserts its pack to die
And you all
Watched me make my slow progress across the floor
Inch
By
Inch
And you did nothing.
You saw, and I saw you see
And you saw me see you pretend to know nothing.
And now I am alive again
Awake and able.
The shadows of my suffering still follow at my heels, trying to trip me as I walk, and scurry behind doorjambs and under tablecloths when I turn to catch them but,
I no longer crawl.
I no longer struggle.
And as I have woken and made my weary way back to humanity
I have found that my complete transformation
My journey into hell and through the fires-
The torment that forged me into something utterly new,
I find that you look past it
Let your eyes slide over me like you used to
Unwilling to ask,
Unwilling to know and yet your false knowing sets off bombs
The ones I walk so lightly over
Grenades buried beneath the tender green new grass
Which covers the battlefield where I fought for my life, for my status as a human being, for my place in this world,
And you say "We all fight."
"Everyone struggles."
Of course
To hurt is to be human. Everybody does-
But not everyone
Sits back and watches another crumble to dust,
Not everyone says
Well
It isn't my problem if they can't cope,
Not everyone looks with eyes
So cold
Upon a bleeding, broken thing
And concludes that because it bleeds when beaten it invites its wounds.
And as you look past me
As you name me by a word I no longer recognize
All I can think is that
I fought
I won
At a cost
And I am still not fully healed,
And yet I am the same to you
Either way
You who are supposed to see
You who are supposed to be
Observers
Of the human condition-
Observers, not bystanders!
Nowhere is it written that you must take notes--
'Oh yes, see how her lip trembles as she cries
See how she fights for breath.'
Nowhere is it set down in stone that you can't
Get up and at least pretend to be like they are
These people you look at
And study
And pin to your pages like butterflies catalogued.
Can you feel? Did you
Feel?
Did you look into my eyes and see me
Decimated
And blame me? And never ask me the truth? And create your own?
Did you really think I could forget being
In the center of a circle
Of lies I had to agree with to survive
Shredding my pride for the sake of my place?
My place, indeed,
In a place where emotions are bought and sold
But never owned or treasured.
You watched me fight
Life or death
You, whose arms I've fallen into when I could have hit the floor,
You who I am supposed to trust with my soul and its dark wounded parts
You who I am supposed to grow with.
You watched me and
You let me
Fight
Alone.

Mikaila Sep 2015

Holding Back

How ironic that some people run before they even truly see in me what there is to run from.
I am kind, perhaps too kind for you,
But I am not what you see.
I would be too sweet if not for my core.
I hide a quiet sort of watchfulness,
The sort a snake has before it strikes, the sort a jaguar has when it sees prey and all the world narrows and compresses to a point
Just out of distance.
I am not the blood. I am the teeth.
And I lie down with lambs who think they're lions, let them walk on me, let them lead.
How much easier people are to know when they think you weak!
And I have no need to use my power, no agenda, no want it would serve to let my nature slip.
Why then should I rise and bare my teeth?
Let them pass, let them sleep,
I have more to hunt than pride and fear:
I could make you kneel but WHY?
To be feared is not to be loved.
To be feared is not to be respected.
If I do not have your respect when I am small
It means nothing when I have expanded,
When I grow tall and loom, my shadow throwing darkness over your pale, surprised face.
All my life with this strong, lithe, wild thing I have lived
And it has crouched within me,
Waiting.
Sometimes it snarls, sometimes it tenses with such an urge to spring
That I must turn away and hold my head to hold it in,
But never once have we-
My beast and I-
Found a reason great enough to strike.
Although inside I move with the easy grace
Of something that knows it was born
To rule
To win
Something so settled in power that it has no need to show itself,
Although beneath my brittle china bones and porcelain skin
There lies another layer-
That of sinew and of black inky vigilance,
A sentient shadow.
Within me is that of claws and talons, that of fangs
That of such perfect, suspended stillness...
Within me lies the moment before the candle goes out
Within me breathes already a last breath
Within me is the moment before a kiss
And the moment before the taking of a life
All at once
All the same moment, in the end,
And yet
I kneel.
And yet I give,
And yet I choose love.
And even from this softened form, this gentle disguise
They flee.

Mikaila Sep 2015

The End

I don't want my life to be a novel anymore. A show. It's beautiful because it's sad, but it feels like it's for other people to look at. Look how strong she's been, look how hard she falls, look how passionate she is. They look but don't touch. They admire but they won't love. I don't want to be a pretty thing, I don't want to be a jewel you examine to see if perhaps you want it, deliberate, ooh and ahh but ultimately decide to set it back down and leave the shop. I am not a thing! I am not a choice. I am a soul that has been treated like a commodity, like a thing, I have been used up and bartered, but I have not been loved, not for long, and never well. And I am wearing out. Tarnishing. A lovely thing gone black with fingerprints but never truly TOUCHED. Every time I feel it. It gets a little harder to conceal the cracks, the dents and tears and scrapes others have left. It gets a bit more tiring each time to say
No, no it's okay, I understand, it is my fault for being what I am.
I believe it less each time. And what then? What when I have run out of meekness? What when I can no longer swallow my pride and hurt? Each time I feel it rising, a tide in me of suffering and outrage, an overwhelming question- WHY would you do this to me? But I know the answer. I swallow the answer like an ember every time it crawls up my throat and screams to be screamed. This is the price of loving a person. Human beings are not tame. They are wild. They come with fangs and fears and cruelties. They come with ignorance and stubbornness. They come with cowardice and pride. And love is defeated in their eyes, every pair of eyes no matter how lovely or how sweet, over and over. I am made too differently to stand and fight against them, and so I have learned to fall, because humans are addictive. These people, these souls. They draw you in and you need their light, their complexity, suddenly you want to comfort them. They are so fragile and so vicious. So exquisite. And so fascinating- for each and every one, no matter how kind, does the same thing with power. They must test it. Touch it. Use it. Their nature begs them to be predators, and they fight it inside, so gorgeously! And they fail so spectacularly! And I fall, wounded, the sacrifice.
There are fangs in me as well, you know. There is venom. Some part of my soul has talons and demands blood. But it, as all vicious things seem to be, was man-made. I was not born with this in me. It rattles the bars of my ribcage and so rarely do I let it see the sun because it has grown from these moments. It has nourished itself on every cruelty I have ever endured.
It says,
See? They are evil inside. They are too selfish to love you. Why do you show them kindness? Why don't you play the game, when you know I hold the power to crush them all? When you know I
Would win?
I shush it with fear and with awe. It is not me. It is only what drags me up when I cry on the floor. It is merely what has brutally, violently kept me alive for all these years and I OWE it, I know I do. I owe it my life several times over now, and yet it is so savage. So cruel. It is the monster that has shown me how to be kind. It rages inside of me and I change its hate into tenderness, and it curses me for my weakness, and we move through this world like a burning ship, sinking and throwing off steam. Moments like this it demands its freedom.
It says,
Take like you've been taken from. Bleed this world dry.
And I say,
I will love it. I will love it until I die of loving it.
And it says:
Congratulations,
*You will.