People tell me I have sad eyes.
They always have, ever since I can remember.
They're right.
Big sad brown eyes, like a child when they first realize that all living things
Die.
Like that moment, if that moment had eyes.

They look sadder right after it rains:
Whenever the rain stops, something inside of me curls back up to sleep
And I ache to see it go
Because it leaves such an echoing space
Like a single harp string struck all alone
While the others glisten with silence.

Sometimes
If I am very lucky and very patient,
I find someone who makes me feel like rain does.
I wake up inside, tentatively at first, a shock of green pushing up through snow, and then all at once
Roots digging into the core of me.
I look at her and I can hear the hush of a thousand shifting whispers
See lightning sliding through her bones and spreading along her skin.
My heart becomes the thrum of hot air high up, yearning for thunder but too human to reach it.

It is then that I'm told my eyes are saddest.

Funny, to be sad about joy
But inside I become a storm, a hurricane trapped in glass,
My body so dangerously brittle and transparent, a thin but hopeless barrier between me and a world I want to touch ferociously
Frantically
Wickedly.
Words are not enough-
I could build stone temples to this feeling
But it would only grind them to sand.
I hum inside like a tuning fork struck, unable to hold all this chaos in such small, fragile casings.

It is a fearful joy
It is joy that knows its hunger
Will be its starvation:
All storms end.

It is the joy and not the sadness that touches my eyes,
But they are so alike
Both filled with a longing too vast for either.
I reel with it,
For when I find my moments of freedom
The world has texture
And I want to spread my palms against it and never be torn away again.
I hold tight, searching every corner for a place to anchor myself
A scalding certainty seeping through me in layers
That it will always be too soon, never close enough,
That before I can begin to discover what people really meant when they created god,
This vibrant place will slip away and fall to dust
And the grays and browns of my stable solitude will bloom again
And crush the color from me.

So many times it's happened
And yet each time is like the first
Like a child realizing that all living things
Die--
The surprise
The grief
The innocence
All over again
And I am left so tired, washed up on the shores of myself
Bleached by cold light which slices through my haze of passion
Revealing
That it has only ever been me in here
And only ever will be.

People tell me I have sad eyes.
I expect they always will.

How could you
Say my name?
It was like
Getting stabbed.

I am not old, yet.

My skin is not powdery and white, see-through like a paper lantern.

But there is a part of me which

When I dare to reach for someone I love

Reaches with brittle ***** fingers, soft and cold and fluttering like white moths

That edge closer to a flame until they catch.

There is a part of me that feels old, and fragile.

And already even in the crest of my youth I’ve cursed this body

For its frailty, its needs.

It suffers and complains, always crying out for something,

Never sated, never still.

I’ve said it feels like living inside a porcelain doll

A look, and cracks can spider out along an arm,

A word and blood can bloom beneath the surface, seeping up into

Bruised pictures and symbols.

I must always be gentle,

I must always be

Watching.

Too passionate, and fissures form, marring the cheek, spreading like shadows thrown by a lace curtain.

I stare out, burning to touch everything,

And yet I pull back:

To dare is to risk, and I’ve seen

Both reward and loss.

I have seen a thousand shining colors spread across me like sunrise,

Warming my skin,

Calling to me like prayer until a bit of light escaped through the spaces between my atoms and reached another person’s palms,

But I have also seen the pale, flat shards of myself,

Sifted through white dust in dismay

For a salvageable portion.

Indeed, there are rooms in this world where sharp edges of me still linger

Waiting in obstructed corners and beneath heavy refrigerators

To gouge a foot or snag a hem,

Interred

In the dark and hollow places where they flew when I shattered and could not gather them all.

I have known

Intimately

My own fragility,

How maddeningly breakable I am

And how difficult to mend.

And there is a part of me now, always,

Which whispers to me when I would be bold,


“You are not old, yet.

But wouldn’t you just love

To live that long?”

New pain is always the worst.
The kind you never knew you could feel.
And I watch you stew in it as I did,
But my viciousness came later.
My stone walls,
My excuses.
I had to be kicked for a long time
Like a wounded puppy
Years
In order to gain the fangs I needed to survive
But what that saved me from was turning my bitterness upon others.
Since I learned only in self defense
My kindness remained.
I sacrificed other parts of me-
Oh, too many, I sometimes think,
To avoid giving it up.
But it remained, like a secret candle I held in the core of me
Its pure light peeking through the bars of my ribcage
When my skin stretched over it like bleached canvas.
You...
I am afraid you're not like me.
I'm afraid you will not give up your love
Like I didn't
But neither, perhaps, will you defend your kindness-
You may not have known cruelty for long enough to realize
You need to.
What you need to fight for is not your survival, not your freedom from the tyranny of feeling, not even your choice to love a girl who treats you so cruelly
What you need to be defending with every breath is your decency, and your empathy, and your innate kindness
Because the world does not love kind people.
The world soils them.
And if you are willing to suffer for love but not for kindness,
You will curdle inside like cream left in the sun.
I have been where you are.
I have been hurt by people like her
And by people like you
And what I have found hardest out of all the things I've survived
Was surviving with KINDNESS.

Survive with kindness,
I'm telling you,
Or your work will be
Wasted.

I've learned over the years that if you are hurt often, like I am,
Either you become the consummate victim-
Pitiful, cowering, sweet to fault, shamefully spineless-
Or you become wiser, a sharper version of yourself,
A bit meaner, a bit tougher.
You turn from white to gray- not sooty yet, but perhaps a bit charred around the edges,
Maybe even slightly carnivorous, like a flower deprived so long of sunlight that it begins to crave
Other things.
You're not entirely wrong, you know.
There is something in me that stalks the world, it's true.
But not you particularly, darling.
Don't flatter yourself.
I'm for bigger game;

I'm after the devil himself--
I'd like a word.

I never knew a face could be so dear
Until I looked on yours.
The moment I met you I saw cruelty in the perfect lines of it and I knew
That you would turn on me
And you did,
Oh, you did.
And yet I look at you with love.
I look long
As long as I can
And thank you that you chose the stage
To make your life with.
I look at you
And search those glittering eyes for moments of truth,
Truth that only comes when someone else's words lend you the shield of a lie.
Your face, framed by light...
Oh, I loved you like a prayer.
I loved you for your harshness,
Your ugliness,
Your
Exquisite
Rage.
People like you are the reason temples were thought of,
And like the old gods you are sudden and cruel
But your face... that face and the soul beneath it
Which lights it from within with a cold, mesmerizing glow...

When I look at you
I finally understand how men would chisel marble
Until their hands bled
Just to capture the smoothness of a woman's cheek.

I wasn't raised with a religion
And so I was never taught to blindly follow something.
The only thing in this world I blindly follow is my heart
And that gets me into enough trouble.
I couldn't imagine blindly following an idea
Or a leader
Or a religion
Or a country
Or even my own parents.
And so, it's true, I've never had much patriotism.
Because as I learned about our nation
It was always clear to me that we were never great, just powerful.
The ideas we tried to build on here are good ideas, freedom, the pursuit of happiness, all of it, I believe in that.
But we didn't build purely on those.
And too many people blindly follow too many others,
And too much complete certainty is hung on ideas that don't start within.
The only thing, I believe, that is safe to trust that way
Is yourself
And even then you must be cautious.
I'm not a patriot.
I'm not a zealot.
I'm not a follower, it's just never worked for me.