We need to talk about how we treat one another like trash in this generation. Because it's toxic.
There's this pattern, and I've talked about it before. We treat one another like objects. Like people are disposible. It's absolutely revolting, and the thing is, ALMOST EVERYBODY DOES IT. Even people who are kind, even people with decent intentions. Why? Because it's easy. We grow up in a society of instant gratification and endless options. And we've begun to SHOP for people. It's sickening. The other side of this is that our generation has romanticized being emotionless SO much that we've forgotten how to forge real connections.
Put simply, we are cowardly.
I see it time and again. I try never to imitate it. It BAFFLES me that we can see each other the way we do- we search for a partner, but we dehumanize them before we even truly connect with them. Because it's easy. I don't understand how you can look at someone and not remember they're a person, but people do it. Behind that text you didn't answer because you are bored, is A WHOLE PERSON. Behind the screens, THERE ARE PEOPLE. How did we get to a point where we could look into another person's eyes and FORGET that they are a miracle? If you feel something for someone, here's a revolutionary concept: why don't you try recalling that there has never been and will never be another being like them. Ever. Try counting how many different events had to spontaneously align just for them to even exist, never mind for you to have met and spoken to and started to connect with them. Try looking at their messages and understanding, for once, that behind that screen of generic emojis there are eyes full of fear and doubt and joy and humanity, and that behind those eyes there is a soul, putting itself on the line to try and reach you. How have we gotten to a point where we just use each other and then let the connection we both worked on slip through our fingers like a bottle into a trashcan? I've been treated like this a hundred times, and I've never gotten used to it. It became hard, at the worst of times, to avoid treating MYSELF like this. But the thing is, whether or not you take this nauseatingly pragmatic and sterilized view of other people, someday you will all be deeply hurting, and deeply alone, and you will reach for someone and pray to find a connection. And it's up to you whether you create a world in which those connections are even possible, whether they're valued, whether at that moment you will be able to expect to find comfort, or expect to be ignored like the annoying text tone they have unwittingly replaced your name with in their heads. ******* shape up. I'm serious. I refuse to live and love in a world where Instagram is more important than me, where showing the world you're doing great outweighs finding happiness, where relationships are played like candy crush games with Russian roulette stakes. I'm not doing it. And you shouldn't either. You exist. You're a human being. You deserve to be acknowledged, not put back on a shelf like a defective box of coffee filters. And so does every other ******* person you know. I don't even mean just the people you love. I mean people. Because they're PEOPLE. If you can't handle the pressure of having someone care about you and talk to you, then grow some ******* ***** and tell them. Make it clear that you will not be giving them your full attention, or any, if that's your choice. Make it clear that you are incapable of connecting on a deep level, so that people who are not yet damaged beyond the point of no return won't have you to thank for their suffering. Nowadays we end relationships over text. And that's if they MATTER. If they don't, we just fall off the face of the earth and leave the other person, whose name we have replaced with an annoying text tone and a flashing light on our phone, to stew in their uncertainty. Sometimes for years. I'll tell you right now, if you think that's somehow "kinder" you are as stupid as you are cruel. Our generation has cultivated, between this attitude of blasé apathy and the idea that people are just products, a kind of casual cruelty. And I don't know about anyone else, but I believe that casually cruel is about the worst thing someone can be. It gives no responsibility, you never have to look at what you've done, and you walk around in a sociopathic haze, leaving the broken hearts of the people you have destroyed inside in your wake. Let me tell you, **** our attitude, **** our casual dismissal of other human beings. I swear to god, scream at me, make me cry, be ******* honest about who you are and what you want, but strap me to a chair and peel off my fingernails before you ignore my humanity like that.

Do you have any idea how it feels
To have someone leave you in order to "protect you"?
And they always think they're the first one ever to do it too
Like there isn't a parade of cowards marching away
With excuses falling from their lips
When really
They're just scared that they could hurt someone so deeply.
I've got news for you all
The ones who leave
The ones who left
For my own good.
You didn't.
You don't.
You left for yours.
You leave
For yours.
You know as well as I do that my pain at being abandoned
Is a thousand times what any cruelty could have been
If only you stuck around to dish it out.
You just didn't
Want
To watch.
I have to watch.
Every time.
I have to watch it decimate the parts of me I've spent time nurturing.
I have to watch and know that you think
You saved me from you.
So let me tell you what being left for your own good feels like.
It feels like being used.
It feels like being patronized.
It feels like being disposable.
It feels like
Being condemned.
I'm brave enough to face the horrors inside of you.
Are you?

Are you
              Done
                       With me
                                       Then?

I know you're in pain.
I can feel it on all the edges of me.
I say nothing
But I wish I could.
I wish I could tell you-
Please, let the universe help you grieve.
Press your hands against the ground and feel the soil there.
This world loves you, from the roots up.
The sun reaches for your face- I've seen it.
It's been years, but I remember.
(You don't forget
What that looks like.)
Deep inside the earth, the stones sing songs about your soul
In a language that doesn't exist anymore-
You have been here
Before
And will be here
Forever.
You are of this place, it filled you with life,
And you fill it with meaning.
The grass learned to grow from your feet
As you learned to stand on it.
When the stars spun out of the blackness of space
They threw their light out in nets
Trying to find you.
This place
Needs you.
It cries with you. 
Go, listen, press your ear to the ground and hear it murmuring
That you will love again
As it has
Over and over
Each time you've gone dark and begun again from dust
And it had to wait, cold and uncertain
For you to be.
Waiting in pain, waiting for you to start again
And make it warmer.
Its ancient grief
Is for you
And to you.
Step out into the rain.
Lay your palms against the smooth stones in the rivers that come from the mountains
And feel the way the water calls to you.
Its path through rock and wood
Through ancient cities
Through war and decay
Through renewal and sunlit fields

Has led it to your fingertips.

It searched
For you.
Please remember that.
Please be certain
Even when you hurt like this-
You belong in this world
And it
Loves you back.
It always has,
It always will.
And although that may not be everything
It is something beautiful.

Are you afraid now? Is that where you went?
Don't make me into something soft.
If you stay
You will see my innocence
You will see my devotion and my weakness.
I will cry in your arms.
I need you to know that when I show you that part of me
I am giving you a gift.
I need you to know that I don't need protecting.
If I love you
It will not be for shielding me from the world.
I have stood all alone against the most violent of storms
Years and years of pain making my skin thick and weathered
Frustration at my own frailty
Sharpening the edges of me.
I need you to know that I am both.
That in order for the girl you may someday love to exist
Sweet and lonely
There must be a side like this,
Bitter, hard, angry.
I need you to know that that side is why I have lived long enough to know you.
I need you to feel the tragedy and the joy that live in it.
I use it to live,
I burn it as fuel
On days when I can feel the coldness creeping into my soul, slowing everything down.
Rage is active.
Pain is passive.
Underneath I am still sweet, and sad, and tired
I promise.
But none of that burns well, you see?
None of that will push me through long months of empty space.
And who can I rely on
If not me?
Nobody
Has ever stayed long enough.
I just can't take the chance, not yet.
And so
I am a creative person.
I found a way to survive.
I always find a way.
And it may not be pretty
It may not be comforting
It may even be
Horrifying,
But it's the reason you can sit here and read my poetry
My words that transport you-
Because I
Am still alive to write it.

There is something
Violent
About everyday life.
And no one talks about it.
Maybe they don't feel it too.
But sometimes I wonder if we weren't made
For higher stakes than this.
I wonder if everyone struggles with it like I do.
Something unspoken and ugly hides beneath everything
Pale and waiting.
At this point, it isn't even grief.
Just silence.
It gets into the cracks and crevices of all the mundane little moments of existence.
It is something
I have tried my whole life not to listen to.
It sounds
Like the opposite of the rain falling
Like the opposite of nature.
And it never stops.
It can't be banished
Only covered.
It has no time of day
No schedule to keep.
Sometimes all of a sudden, as I'm eating a meal in the quiet
This feeling will creep down my throat with it
And spread roots of emptiness inside my stomach.
It isn't loneliness.
Sometimes I call it that.
But it's​ worse, almost.
Loneliness has an object, a purpose. It fills a need.
This creates one.
It has no anchor and no reason
It only is
And always has been.
As a child I spent so much time alone
And sometimes I would speak into the silence
Just to be sure I still could.
I'd hear my voice, feel the vibrations of it.
I'd know I spoke.
But then a moment later, suddenly I was unsure.
Suddenly I couldn't tell if I'd said anything
Or only imagined speaking.
And maybe this shouldn't have woken the creeping fear in me that it did
But I would get to shouting before long
Tears streaming down my face
Unable to prove to myself that I existed.
I would run downstairs to my mother
And interrupt her at her work.
Full of chaos and terror
I'd cry on her shoulder
In relief
Finally reassured, by her bewildered look, that when I spoke it made a sound.
This feeling
Is that feeling.  
I think maybe I created it
And it has whirred around me since childhood
Latching onto all the small tasks of life and endowing them with fear.
It is a tiredness, a heaviness, a soul deep uncertainty grinding away at me beneath the noise of the world.

Tonight it is louder than everything else
And I'm writing
To ask it to stop.

I've been trying not to write to you.

I spent a lot of time alone in museums as a child.
Often it was the Museum of Fine Art in New York.
My father would teach, and I would go to the museum.
I was too young to be there by myself.
The marble floors echoed with footsteps.  
People swirled around me,
But as I was so small, nobody really saw me.
I was glad they didn't.

There was a room full of statues where the slanted ceiling was made of glass
And sometimes rain would slide down it and make them seem alive.
I burned to touch them.
Their skin
Looked soft.

I never spoke on those days.
I just looked.
Sometimes at the art,
Sometimes at the people.
Everyone had somewhere to go, it seemed,
Buzzing with murmured conversation like bees in an enormous hive
They blurred past me.
But every so often I would wander into a room
And find a stranger standing alone before a painting
Completely still and starkly different from the others, as if caught in amber
And I'd know that if I looked at the painting too
I would see a little piece of their soul there.

Maybe that was where it started,
Maybe that was how I began to look into people.
I say into-
I mean
That if you place a mirror directly across from another, the repeating reflection goes on forever,
And if the light hits it just right it creates a prism-
Hallways of mirrors all throwing shards of light and color and shadow back on one another infinitely.
I say into, and I mean that I haven't found my home yet
But I've seen little glimpses of it
Refracted in someone's eyes
Just for a second-

Only ever for a second
And only ever there.

I've been trying not to write to you.

There's something I'm looking for,
And I've been searching for it since I can remember.
It is a constant hunger in the core of me,
Deeply rooted and deeply unsatisfied.
As I grew, it grew
And bore fruit I could never stop craving
But could never be sated by.
People sense it in me, now.
I see it touch them.
Sometimes a stranger will move around me like a moth around a flame
Trying to get close enough to thaw, but not
To burn.
Sometimes, they will withdraw
And look at me with shining eyes
Like an animal which knows something with teeth
Watches.
Whatever it is,
It moves me like it moves them,
But in here is no retreating from it.

After years of aching inside, I learned to seal myself up.
It was so tiring to need all the time
On such a massive scale
To chase something I wasn't even sure existed.
If I can keep all the light out
Sometimes whatever is in there will curl in on itself and fall asleep
Dormant, like a plant beneath deep snow,
But even while it sleeps, it grows.
The world settles into a haze
And I find...
Not peace,
But at least rest.

Sometimes I stay like that for months,
Sometimes I convince myself that there is no other way to live.

But nothing is ever permanent,
And eventually someone
Takes me by surprise.

All it takes is the barest of seconds
And I am garishly exposed
And the light is harsh.
I throw up my walls, my defenses,
And huddle, praying in the dark.
But by then
I never know if I am praying to be overlooked
Or discovered.
I only know
That it's the hardest I've ever prayed,
Every time.

Days. Weeks, maybe.

The memory of light courses through me
A drumbeat
Attaching itself to the rhythm of my heart and vibrating my bones.
I struggle to contain it
And it echoes off the walls of me, pressing against my skin from the inside.
It seeps through my dreams, steady and strong,
And cracks form all over,
Pinpricks of light slicing in.

When I accept defeat it is like being rescued.

This
Is the feeling I have fought against and worshiped my whole life.
It is the feeling I have watched people run from
Wracked by fear I feel with them but cannot answer to.
It is the feeling which
Some days
Becomes so consuming that I can't eat, can't sleep, can't think.

Like any ancient deity, it demands blood.
But like any good one, it delivers salvation.

It is this... thing, this need,
Which has pushed me out into the world again every time I have decided that I am too fragile for it.
Its nourishment
Is beauty
And I am its instrument
Before I am my own.
I search, I wander.
And it has twisted me inside with pain, sometimes,
But it has also given me purpose.

Once, I stood waist deep in the sea at dusk
In the tropics
With the sun reaching red across the surface towards me
And something in me reached back.
The trees behind me shed their white flowers into the waves
And a storm broke overhead.
The water churned with drops
Lighting seared across the hot sky
Thunder rumbled through me
And I was surrounded by a world of chaos and light and fury.
Beneath me the tide tugged this way and that on the hem of my dress
Wrapping around my hips and pressing me towards the open ocean.
For the smallest moment then,
I didn't feel the twisting of need in my chest.

Since that day I have followed this strange gravity
Whenever I wake up inside.
I let it lead me anywhere, everywhere, as long as I find a moment of peace at the end.

I've followed it through London streets
Where mist hung thick in the air and turned the light from the streetlamps to floating golden dust
Dragging my hands along the rough stones of buildings in the shadows
Searching with my palms for something​ to soothe me.

I have been pulled from my bed
And out onto lonely roads made of dirt and clay
Trying to wrap my fingers around the slivers of moonlight that slant through the trees
In those moments of morning when the world holds its breath,
When the spiderwebs are still poised to catch their silvery droplets and splay out in shining galaxies on the dark, whispering grasses.

I have swallowed my hesitance and stepped into crumbling buildings
With vines snaking through their bare windows
Found the dormant hearts of them and listened to the small scuttlings without fear or judgment,
Spoken to the ghosts in their hollow language of sighs and coldness.

I have stepped to the very edges of high places
And looked straight down
Felt the complex craving that all human beings have
Which bids them fall
And let it swallow me without letting it move me.

I've looked into eyes that thrilled and terrified me with their power
And opened myself completely
Sinking to my knees.

All this in service of a feeling, which like a shining thread pulls me irresistibly onward, keeping me up nights with my futile searches, and filling me with words and art and music too intricate to make but too urgent to lock away.



I've been trying not to write to you.

It didn't work.

I always wonder what it'd be like to belong to someone
Who would actually want to have me.
I've spent so many years of my life
Devoted
To people who weren't devoted to me.
Because
Well
I need to belong somewhere.
I need someone to wake up thinking of.
And it turns out
I need that more than I need to be valued
Or understood
Or even thought of.
I need it much more than I need to be loved.

And I try, I do, to exist as an island.
Sometimes I make it months before I fail
Spectacularly.
Sometimes I even forget how much I miss love.
But inevitably I remember.
And inevitably I fall in love
With people who don't fall in love with me.
Avoidance doesn't work,
Rushing in headlong to face my fears doesn't work,
Trying to be calm and subtle and normal...
Definitely doesn't work.

Frankly, I'm out of ideas.

Time after time I face this-
The fear, the vulnerability, the shadows of my past failures which loom around me.
I stay up nights
I make beautiful art
I cry
I laugh at nothing
I spend excruciating hours waiting and worrying for no good reason
I stop being hungry for food
But wander the streets like a starving animal all night
And for the past few months I've thought,
Isn't it nice to go to bed when I want to?
To not feel afraid all the time?
To have no one whose attention and affection I pine for?
(And believe me, pine is an understatement in even the mildest of cases for me.)
Isn't it nice to just be?

And maybe I didn't feel very alive,
Maybe my life was a little empty,
And my art untouched,
And my pages blank...
But I was hungry at every meal.
I woke up mornings feeling safe.
I felt sane.

Since I realized what it meant to love another person
It has been what I believe the purpose of my existence to be.
But what if I'm just... allergic to it?
What if it just makes me crazy?
And unstable?
And unsafe?
And exhausted?
What then?
And I still believe in love so much,
But after these past years
I have to wonder whether love
Believes in me,
Or whether I've just chosen to devote myself to
One
More
Thing
That... doesn't really care.

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.

Somehow
Even now
After everything you've done to me,
I love to see your face.
I think you're beautiful.
I think you're mesmerizing.
Your soul pulls mine
And it always will.
That, I think,
Must be what it means to truly love someone.

I don't remember how to be with someone now.
I remember it was nice.
But today...
I wouldn't know how to share a bed.
How to wrap someone in my arms.
I wouldn't know how to fit my hand into another.
I've forgotten why I miss her.
I remember it was warm, and safe, and happy
But I don't remember how.
I remember our naked bodies used to fit together like halves
Every curve of hers in every valley of mine,
I remember her skin on my skin made us both something new...
But I don't remember how that felt to me.
Why it was so special, so spiritual, so necessary.
I don't remember how to listen to the slow breaths of another person in the early hours of the morning.
I don't remember how to walk down a street hand in hand
Or kiss good night
Or truly look into the eyes of someone else and see the soul inside.
I've forgotten.
It...went.
So quickly.
And now I am in bed alone and I am not sad, or lonely, or angry.
I am just bewildered
That I don't remember how it feels to love someone.

I know why I love horror films
I just never say it.
I love them
Because I am tortured by feelings
By empathy
By kindness
And I'm looking to learn
The kind of safety that comes with ruthlessness.
I'm looking to glance up just for one second into my own eyes in a mirror
And see nothing at all behind them.
Just once.
I think people who love as hard as I do always long to feel nothing.

******* for making me look down
When you deserve to suffer under my gaze.

You will be a chapter in the Bible of my life
And you
Will not fade from me
Because this body is a temple
And I am the god to which it is devoted:
When I am old I will trace the scars on my hands
As proof that I reached for something.
You may try to erase me.
You may even try to unmake me
But love and hate
Look so similar as scars
And thanks to yours we carry matching ones.
I will tell my stories, because they are mine to keep.
I will write about
The girl who made me afraid to walk the hallways of my own school
Her loathing for herself so complete that it swallowed me as well,
And I will shout my words
Because it is my right as a creature with a heart and a voice
And my duty as a human being.
I have led a violent life
Battered by a sea of people
Whose cowardice is stronger than their goodness.
But if I am silent about them
They'll **** me and say I deserved it.
If I am silent
Your threats worked
And you will continue to meet the world with your fear and your viciousness
And leave it uglier than you found it.
So I am here to say that
Whether you hate me or not
I am as sacred as you are
And my life
Is my own.
It is not my job to make you comfortable.
It is not my job to disappear
If you dislike what you see in me.
You don't own me.
You don't own my art.
You don't own my feelings.
You don't own my stories,
And you don't own what I do with them.

There is a sacredness to people who are damaged.
Sometimes I think
That
Is my religion.

I gaze into the abyss not in fear or even fascination,
But in the hope that the longer I gaze, it may give me something of itself and live in me.

We hadn't seen each other for a year.
Before you kissed me
You smiled at me
With those sparkling blue eyes
(My heart
Stopped.)
And you said
"When I met you you said
It's okay, I'll probably be in love with you for like three years and then get over it.
It's been almost three years, maybe this is the end."
And I said,
"I was mistaken."
And kissed you.
But you're gone again
And I've decided.
I've decided
I wasn't mistaken.
I've decided
You were right.
This
Is
The
End.

Lost in the dark again
So vast and clear
It could be space
Stars winking, feet uncertain for a moment on the ground
I look up
I look out
And there is nothing and no one.
But we have
Been here before.
Down the darkened drive I walk
Unhurried
For I have long since learned
How hard it is to fear the things of the night
If you are one of them.
The blackness parts like mist before me
Stirring, inky,
And I pass through it like a ghost
And it sizzles along my skin like black water.
Maybe in the day you could make me kneel,
Maybe you could wring tears from me,
But you are of the light.
Your eyes dance sunshine
Your hair holds gold now, and red.
You smile and turn the lights on
Everywhere at once.
But I walk and darkness follows me like a faithful hound,
Its black eyes glittering, its breath silent, hot and cold at once.
I can with impunity walk among the filaments of fog that stand in the air when the moon sinks into the velvet curtains of the sky
And I can look at you now, paler in my mind, smaller than you seemed.
Here, now, no matter how I may have loved you, you cannot scare me,
For your light, although it brought me joy, was never my light.
Here it can be snuffed like a flame, a sudden brilliant candle which came
Unprepared for the chill.
It was reflected, dancing, for a moment
In the depths of me, like sunlight glinting off minnows in the shallows of a fathomless lake
And briefly I craved it- as all dark things briefly do-
Something golden and warm, something like the way laughter sounds, something so foreign and so new.
But here I am now at the bottom
And I am silent,
And my joy in what I am is something different, darker, fuller, like the smell of soil after rain.
Not tremulous, not fearful,
This is a wild, ancient joy,
This is the joy of a creature which knows it can live in the dark,
Something which has been buried time and again
And still, perversely, breathes.
Something which has learned to feel its way
With the same small, sensitive hands so often burned and battered by embers and shards of glass
Shed by loves which burnt to ash and shattered, suddenly and violently, to little more than dust.
This is the slow-smiling joy of something which has gradually become, through unwilling struggle, very hard to ****,
And with almost smug relish it looks upon anyone who quails at the night
Or starts at the sudden breaking of a twig in the dark.
This is the complex, lonesome joy of the wolves as they howl at the moon.
It is my power, to walk softly through the darkness and let it touch me,
Throw back my head and feel its coolness raise the hair along my arms.
To be free from fear in a place built from it.
And this is the reason I can walk away from you and your tempting light:
You held me briefly in your arms,
But I hold in me an echoing darkness, great and terrible, and it croons to the night,
And although that night is brutal and cold to the bones, it does not ask me to be different.
And although it may swallow me
At least will swallow me
Whole
Unsullied and as I am
Unchanged, unchangeable, unapologetic-
Full of everything you ever ran from
And full of all the reasons that,
If you're so scared,
You should run faster.

Do you ever get that feeling
The feeling
When you're ten pages away from the end of a book you love?
You know the one-
That ache
That mingled fear and longing and nostalgia
A strange, electric urgency, a need to race to an ending you don't actually want to arrive at.
It is such a distinct, such a strangely painful feeling.
Do you ever feel it
When you look at your own eyes in the mirror?

I am sat in a cramped seat on a dimly lit plane
And a child wails somewhere beyond me,
Something between a giggle and a sob
And for the first time since I can remember
I don't know where I'm going.
And I want to drown myself in books.
Other people's stories.
I want to smother this feeling in them,
I want to live in the middle of someone else's life and never emerge again.
For the first time ever
I don't know where I'm going.

I can't explain this feeling.
It isn't the feeling I've had before, the tired sort of feeling you get when snow begins to trickle from the clouds on a fall day
And you just know in your bones that it will be
A hard, brutal winter.
Nor is it the feeling I've become familiar with
Of a spring which has somehow become lodged in my sternum and pressed to its breaking point,
That excruciating, itching tension and worry.
It isn't the feeling I've woken up to on countless mornings-
A creeping dread which feels like nothing so much as cold, clammy fingers running softly along every inch of your skin, except inside.

No, this feeling is one of total newness.
It is blind uncertainty.
It is a feeling of transition that I suppose I've suffered too much, previously, to have noticed or lingered in
And yet this time I find I've stuck fast in it
Like a shoe in a particularly deep patch of mud, when you tug and pull but the earth perversely refuses to relinquish your foot.
I've snagged, like a new coat on a briar bush
In this feeling of unsettled, unfinished, unsatisfied... expectancy.
Not of anything bad but certainly as well
Not of anything good.
I have, suddenly, upon being truly alone for the first time in a long time,
Discovered that I am moorless
And yet stalled.

And it isn't just that first feeling, no.
It is half of that feeling, that
"I don't want to finish the book" feeling.
But it is also equally the feeling you might get
If you were ten pages to go in your riveting novel,
Only to turn one and suddenly find that the rest was blank,
Halfway through a sentence
Halfway through a word
Nothing resolved, and nothing explained.
And maybe you'd keep turning, hoping for a mistake in the binding
But all ten are the same
Smooth. White. Blank. Waiting.
It is that feeling of grief and frustration and slight fear
A fondness for all the pages read before
But a craving for more that will not come
As if the ink would simply syphon away, even if you were, in your desperation
To write them yourself.

Yes, it's that feeling
Only about myself. About my life.
And I don't know when it will end
Or what it will end into.

I don't want it.
Tell me stories.
Tell me stories for the rest of my days
And never let my mind
Fall silent.

And when I am lonely and withered soon
Remember me as I am now
With flowers in my hair
And stars in my eyes
Soaking the moment dry
And loving with my whole soul
You you you.
Now is forever for me, and I still intend
To spend it with you.

I've been searching for a fountain for this entire visit.
People don't seem to wish much here.
I had a two pence piece saved in my pocket
And I took it everywhere with me
Just in case.
And maybe as I walked it absorbed my uncertainty
My misery
My acceptance
My love and joy
Maybe it grew warm in my pocket with the weight of everything coursing through me for these weeks.
And here I am, sat alone and silent by a bubbling fountain
In a soaring white hall
And the light glances off coins in its depths
They glimmer and wink, giving the water a false glow.
So many wishes.
At the bottom, where the water drains, I can see them piled, half hidden by stone.
People who sat like I sit and poured their desires into a coin
Or people who walked casually past and, on a whim, found a penny and tossed it in,
Their wishes have collected here, like sand and pebbles at the emptying of a river,
The residue of us.
I take my coin out and hold it in my palm until it grows hot.
I have always known what to wish for before.
Every moment, always known where I wanted to go.
But this time I turn it over and over in my fingers, trying to read something divine in its ridges and valleys, its rough edges.
I think for a long time.
Finally, I decide
Not to decide.
"Help me."
"Save me."
"I want to be happy."
Because for the first time in my life
I don't know what will get me there.
I don't know what I want to happen.
I only know what I want to feel.
I want to be happy.
I want to be happy.
I want to be happy.
Help me be happy.
I repeat it in my mind, trying to find a clearer answer, a better wish,
But all that comes, cyclical, is "I want to be happy."
I throw the coin in and it sinks to the bottom, indistinguishable from the others.
I've made my wish.
So why do I feel so lost?

The thing you are searching for
No longer
Exists.

In Shakespeare
People just die if the person they love leaves them.

There's totally something to be said for that.

My love,
I'm not sure I ever said this to you.
I thought you just knew.
I really thought you knew:
I will love you if you change.
However you change.
It will fill me with joy
As long as you let me stay near you.
I will love you if you pack your bags and cut off your hair and go to a country where nobody speaks your language
Just take me with you.
I will love you if you're sick
If you're sad
If you're angry and lost and you lash out.
(I will even love you if you stop loving me.)
When I say there is nothing you could ever do to lose my love
I mean it.
If I can touch you,
If I can't,
If you go out every night,
If you stay in,
If you need to talk,
Or to be silent,
I will love you for the rest of your life and mine.
I thought you knew
That there is nothing I won't try for you
Nowhere I won't go for you
Nothing I won't do for you.
Nothing makes me happier than you.
I would follow you into hell if you'd have me
And you would make it heaven by looking upon it.
I would give up my life, my sanity, my every plan
For a few moments with you,
And you can take these words
And carve them on every sidewalk and
Paint them on every passing car
And even if they last until we are dust
Until nobody even knows what they mean
I will still mean them.
You're my dream. You're why.
For everything. You're what I want at the cost of anything else,
And in case you wonder if I know what I'm saying when I write that, I do
I know
Intimately
Exactly
What that means
And I mean it
More than I've ever meant anything.
This is no love poem.
This is a life poem, an existence poem,
An outpouring of the desire that hums within me for you on every scale
Every level
Every plane.
I choose you, for the rest of time,
Until you send me away, or until we are no more.

I don't know why I love you so much.
That was never the plan.
It isn't safe, to love someone like this
And I always knew it.
But the way your hair curls down your cheeks when you've fallen asleep and it has escaped its pinnings
The way your eyelashes leave shadows down your cheeks
The way your eyes sparkle when you laugh
You hit something so beautiful and painful in my heart.
The way you are,
Everything about the way you are
Just tears me open with love.
When you cry, I long to wrap you in my arms and protect you from every pain you inflict on yourself.
It pulls me toward you, this need to show you with my skin that I belong to you.
Resisting it carves out a huge crater in my chest
As if more and more of me goes to you by the second
But I can't follow it and make myself whole again.
If I do this, if I succeed in these next few weeks,
If you continue to love me
And relearn how to touch me
It will have been the hardest thing I ever did for someone I loved.
If I smile at you and show you how happy you make me
And manage to hide how broken I am,
If I can survive it when you turn away from me in bed,
And pull away from my touches.
I've always said that not reaching for someone I adore
Is an act of unutterable love
And it has never been more true
Because you used to reach back,
You used to crave me like I crave you
Not ***, but closeness, oneness.
I live alone.
I have always lived alone.
And not for a second have I liked it.
I can count on my hands the number of times in my life I've felt at home and whole.
This
What I am doing for you
Trying to do
By giving you all the choice in this
This is the biggest, most difficult thing I have ever given anyone.
And if at the end I lose you
Make no mistake
I will have nothing. I know it. I fear it.
When I woke up this morning the terror of it took my breath away
Because my body knows.
And it won't be losing you that does it,
It will be these weeks,
These weeks and the strength I don't have, the hang on by your fingernails strength I will have to find
In order to keep my head above water and show you why you love me.
By the end of this
I will have used every failsafe I have,
Every life support, every backup plan
I will be stripped raw and naked inside, armorless and starved,
And if you go I will be more unprepared for the agony of losing you
Than I have ever been for any sort of pain.
It is my life I'm giving you, right now,
And it's impossible for you to understand unless you've felt this looming shadow that I live with
But I'm giving you
Every bit of energy I always save to keep myself alive when I am swallowed by the dark.
And I am... so afraid. So inexpressibly, mesmerizing afraid.
I am facing my absolute worst fear every second for all this time,
And it's important that I say that.
Because I've never done it for anyone.
I've never been able to.
And maybe sometimes I'll crack, and you'll see tears, and I'll reach for you.
But I swear to god I'd be less afraid to jump after you off a bridge than to do what I'm doing now.
In ways I would rather die, because it wouldn't take so long with so much fear.
And I have to say this, I have to, because whichever way this turns out
This tops every act of love I have ever done before
And every risk I have ever taken
And every fear I have ever faced.
You are more important to me than I could ever express,
And I love you enough to give you my life,
In every horrible, beautiful sense of the word.

I wanna say
Marry me, you're the one.
I wanna say
I sit up nights missing you.
I wanna say
You make me smile on my worst days, and you don't even know it.
I wanna say
When you're not around for a while I can feel a part of me start to ache.
I wanna say
I don't mind if you get angry about "dumb stuff"
I wanna say
I wish I didn't feel sad when you go out with your friends instead of saying good night.
I wanna say
Thank you for being kind to me when I'm scared and miserable.
I wanna say
I'm glad you're on my skin forever, whether you stay by my side forever or not.
I wanna say
Half of me isn't sad when you're away, and I can't tell if it is trust in you or something else, and it scares me but it also gives me hope.
I wanna say
Please be patient with me, like you've been. I am used to being left and forgotten. I am used to being pushed aside.
I wanna say
Maybe years will undo that. Years with you.
I wanna say
When I am away from you, it is because I have been torn away by my life, and I will always, always come back, as long as you want me to.
I wanna say
If you ever forget me, I forgive you.
I wanna say
When I am lonely like I am right now, it isn't your fault, even when you can fix it.
I wanna say
I feel like I can't ask you to come back because you haven't left, and I feel like I can't ask you to talk more because I couldn't talk for so long when I was busy, but when you're away like this it starts to feel like you don't exist.
I wanna say
In those moments at 3 am when I wonder if you DO exist, that even then you are the best dream I ever had.
I wanna say
I don't know how to speak when I'm not suffering. And I'm not. I'm not even sad. I'm just waiting.
I wanna say
You're worth waiting for.
I wanna say
It's so much easier in person, when I can show you I love you with a touch and feel that you love me when you look at me.
I wanna say I never have doubts like this when we're together.
I wanna say
Just because I worry doesn't mean you're doing something wrong.
I wanna say
I just ******* MISS you.
I wanna say
I'd give anything to have you asleep beside me right now, instead of thousands of miles away.

New world, new life.
This one should be
Colder.
Inside I've stopped
But stopped like a machine with something jammed in the gears
The idea of motion presses on
Grating against itself
Mechanisms I don't understand have stalled
But growl low with their metal fury,
Growing hot.
I am paused, inside,
A picture on a screen, shifting between one second and the next,
Parts of me pixelated and blurry with interrupted action.
It feels, too, like my chest is being filled up with cotton
Packed tight
To keep the gears from grinding in their desperation to restart.
It feels thick.
I am slowly becoming less hollow
And more... muffled.
This feeling
It's wrong
It's dangerous
But I watch it continue and make no move to stop it.
The mechanisms must be protected
Even at the expense of the work to be done.
Until I know if there will be damage
Nothing will move inside of me.

Sometimes, when you are away
I can feel myself shrinking inside.
I don't want it to happen.
I don't like it, or what it means about me.
But it continues anyway.
It's this.... feeling.
Like a flower languishing in a dark closet.
And I hate it.
I don't want to write about it.
I don't want to think about it.
I just want to go to sleep
And only wake up when you're back.
And how useful is that?
But today I slept
18 hours
And I wish I was
Asleep again
And this is why I am hard to love.
I know you being away is not the only reason I feel like this.
I know I feel like this
Because my brain is full of chemicals
Making connections
Which my mind tries to explain.
But on days like this
Days like this that stretch into weeks like this
(Please, not months?)
I reach for you and I wither inside when you are far away
Busy
Distracted
Out
Gone.
Sometimes when you're back
It feels like you're still not
Back.
And so I don't push anymore, on days like this.
But I'm the same person who cried over Skype to you
At Christmastime
Because I needed you to reassure me that you loved me.
It has been so long
And you will get tired of it
And I will still need it.
I still need it.
I still need you.
On days like this I don't tell you anymore
Because you're always so busy
And because I can never tell,
So far away,
If you are going through the motions of loving me.
I let you stay away without telling you it hurts because it would hurt more if you pretended to be here
And maybe that's how it would be, you know?
Maybe you'd be calling it in, talking to me because I begged you to.
And there's never a good time to fall apart on you.
There's never a good time to say that for months I've been feeling sadder and sadder, feeling you slip away because
You feel secure
But you have to know, someday I have to tell you
I don't know what safe means.
And I'm always afraid. It will take
So many years
For me not to be afraid.
And it's not your fault
And it's so much to ask,
But I need you to be here.
And I just...
I wither
When you're not.

Someday you will be out in the world
Having pulled every root of yours
From the ground
And torn every heartstring
From those around you
On your way
Out.
Too busy
Too skittish
Too wild
Too cowardly
Too strong
For them all.
And you will turn around and find
That you are alone for the first time
My friend
And you will realize
That there is nobody left who is wishing they could talk to you
Nobody who would come running to your side
If you called them at 1 in the morning
Nobody who thinks of you every day or even every few
With fondness and hope.
And you will feel very sad
My friend
Because you will have so carefully pushed them all away that you will see nobody left who cares that you still live.
But
Even though you will not speak to me
Even though you hardly look at me
Even though
You don't want to know me
You'll be wrong, when you realize all that
Because there will still be me.
That is my last gift to you.

My special talent is courage.
I know it maybe doesn't seem it. I know I sit small. I know talk soft. But courage is my special, special talent. I go for what I want. And sometimes I forget how rare that is. Sometimes I forget that people lay it all on the stage, but not on the table. I wear my scars in art all along my arms not to remind me that I have been hurt but to remind me that I fought for something. Something real. Something worth risking this for.
I live hard. I love hard. I risk, hard. And because of that I go to bed every night knowing that if there is something I want, I mean something I ache for with my whole heart and all the dark parts of my soul, if there is something I crave and I don't have it, I can sleep knowing I have done absolutely everything I can about it.
When I fail, I fail so spectacularly that you could write a play about it. And people would clap. When I fall I hit bottom so hard the echoes could level a city. And I love every moment. Because we aren't here to leave this life unscathed. I have broken so beautifully and so completely that now I am free. Little parts of me have scattered into all the corners of the places I've cried in, and now I find I CAN cry. I can breathe. I can love someone hard enough to run after them down the street, look them in the eyes, and tell them I'll love them until the day I die, even when I know they will turn around and walk away. I carry this beautiful, wild, mad devotion to my heart within me, and it is so dangerous, but it is so worth it. Whether I win or lose, it is so... worth it.
Life will ******* up, and kick you down, and bleed you until you think you have nothing left. But you don't. You only have nothing left if you decide you do. I have every ugly, exquisite moment I ever loved or lost and they fill me with pride. Because, you know, I did something about every, single, one of them. Never have I sat in silence and let my life lead me. Never have I given up and walked away from someone or something that made me feel even a little bit. And I never, ever will. Because I know why I'm here, and it's that.
And because every time I remember how truly, madly brave I am no matter the consequences, I feel nothing but joy.

Depression is
"I should shower now, while I'm still feeling okay."
Depression is
Drinking water with every bite because you don't want to eat.
Depression is
Having an audiobook on while you sleep to keep yourself from waking up vulnerable.
Depression is
Taking risks to try and reach yourself.
Depression is
Vivid memories overlaying themselves on reality.
Depression is
Wanting to do your schoolwork but being unable to find the strength.
Depression is
Not answering texts because too much interaction tires you out.
Depression is
Having to work harder than everyone else for the same result, and being called lazy anyhow.
Depression is
Sleeping for 14 hours and still being tired.
Depression is
The guilt that comes with finding one person who makes you feel good, and knowing you will burden them.
Depression is
Being left by your lovers or friends because they don't understand.
Depression is
Piles of ***** laundry you wish you had the inner fortitude to do.
Depression is
Wandering the empty roads in the middle of the night because you can't sit still.
Depression is
Reading a book whenever you are in public to ease the stress.
Depression is
Not always
Visible.

I'm sorry you saw me lingering there.
I just wanted
To see you smile.

I think I finally understand.

I'm the part of you you'd love to ****,
And you're the part of me I'd love to die by.
We were a perfect, violent match
For a moment
And that is why although we never touched
Our craving and disgust for one another
Burns us whenever we meet eyes now.

It's okay if you forget me for an hour, or even a day,
So long as each night when you fall asleep I am there in your head and your heart
As you are there in mine.

I trusted you.
That's really the gist of it.
That's why this won't go away.
I let many people into my life
Good and bad
Strong and weak
Tender and cold
But I trust so few.
Even those who deserve it
Even those who prove their loyalty
I trust
So few.
I trusted you.
I trusted you.
I think my trust must carry venom
And poison the people I bestow it on
Because you are not cruel.
Not you.
You are not sudden like the strike of a cobra.
You are not cold like ice.
Not you.

None of them were.
None of them ever were before they were
To me.

(Rage more.)

The truth is that I still trust you.
The truth is that I laugh when you say something funny to someone else and your face lights up,
And smile when you get what you want,
And wish you well whenever I look at you.
The truth is that I can't help it.

All I am is sad even though I try
I try so hard
To be angry at you for hurting me.
For hurting me and turning away
As if that helps anything.
For throwing your hands up at the first sign that perhaps
When I told you over and over that you had my trust
I meant it.
And that perhaps
You broke it.
And that perhaps
You might contribute to the storm that is me, well-
You've always stood for storms before
And let them reach your heart.
And you will stand for mine.
The day you didn't leave when I gave you your first chance
Was the day you chose to influence my heart and soul
My self worth
My happiness.
It is a choice I warn everyone not to make lightly.
It is a choice that few understand until they regret having made it.
You like the rain, darling?
You like
The thunder?
Rage MORE-
There is a hurricane in my blood
Every cell
Swirling and savage
And you
You stirred it up
You made it scalding sweet-
And you of all people
You who've seen so very many
Should know that there is no halting
A storm.
No fleeing from it.
No reasoning with it,
And no
Abandoning it.
I trusted you.
I
Trusted
You.

Rage more.

I love your hair when you've just woken up.
I love your tired voice.
I love when you're kissing me and we start laughing.
I love the way just touching you skin to skin makes me feel home.
I love the faces you make in photos.
I love how many different shades of green your eyes are.
I love how you can never stay awake through a movie, but you'll say you're paying attention if I ask.
I love that you throw things when you're frustrated, cause it means you let it out and don't let it hurt you inside. Broken things can be fixed. Broken people are much harder to resolve.
I love when you sing along to your favorite songs and send me videos.
I love your writing.
I love that when you're drunk, all you want is me.
I love that when I kiss you it feels like we can't live without each other.
I love how truly, truly kind you are.
I love your colorful swear words.
I love taking care of you.
I love how you are always there for me.
I love holding your hand.
I love your integrity and how much you want to reach your goals.
I love your courage. You're so brave, and I don't even know if you realize.
I love that I always know when you're done sneezing, cause you only say "choo!" on the very last one.
I love that we say good night every night.
I love staying in bed with you ALL day.
I love when you make your inner monologue outer and I can hear all your beautiful, funny, brilliant thoughts.
I love that you don't let anyone treat you badly.
I love how much you love your dog.
I love your hands.
I love the way your neck smells.
I love falling asleep in your arms.
I love all the accents you do.
I love that curl that always goes inside out.
I love that you can make me laugh until I cry.
I love how much I want you, all the time.
I love that you have a cardboard cutout of that guy (Niall, as you told me vehemently) from one direction.
I love planning a life with you, and laughing and joking about naming our kids odd things, but knowing that underneath we are really going to have a life together.
I love that the only tears I ever shed over you are tears of love, laughter, and joy.
I love that you kept the rose I gave you on our first date.
I love how much I trust you.
I love that you love all the things about me I was worried nobody would ever love.
I love that you want to talk to me all the time the same way I want to talk to you all the time...
But most of all
I just love you. Always.

Valentines Day 2016

It was time.
It was time, and so I read every one of your poems and
Cried.
They were different tears from last time.
Some truer grief fell with these
And they
Were silent.
Silver, like rain reaching its fingers into the soil
Late at night
Ready to grow something
Lovely.
I know you
So much better now.
I loved you- oh, how I loved you
In a complex way
The way that always
Loses me the thing I love.
I shake now, the aftershocks of feeling vibrating my bones
A music too low and too aching
For sound
It murmurs to the earth
And, sleeping beneath the snow, the ground echoes my loss back to me.
I loved you, how I loved you
But I never knew you like I do now.
How you must hate yourself, inside.
People who hate themselves always hate me.
They love me first, and then they loathe me.
If I am lucky, someday they face themselves and forgive me for loving what they hated for so long.
It is all very wearisome and human of them.
Sometimes I see you in the halls.
You refuse to meet my eyes,
As if we were two high school lovers broken up
The week before,
Pretending our lives were not
Altered.
I look at you, though.
I loved you different than that.
There was nothing of owning to it, nothing of flesh,
And so although my heart and mind miss yours
Miss the rise and fall of your low voice,
Miss the thoughts and ideas, so intricate, exquisite
That you would write to me instead of sleeping at night,
To see you doesn't make me angry.
I know seeing me makes you angry.
I see it in your jaw, the way your eyes go dead.
Oh, darling, I know you so well now
So much better than if you'd been kind to me.
Do you forget that as I told you my dreams and my fears
You slowly unveiled your own?
I still feel them, beneath your wax mask of indifference.
They live.
They rule you, as always, more even than before.
They are why
You cannot look at me.
Maybe you loved me. Who knows. And if you did
Who knows how. There are so many ways
To love someone.
There isn't a word for how I loved you.
Now when I dream it is of a little flat with a cat and a curly haired girl in bed beside me
But you never took shape like that in my mind.
You were never a companion, never a lover.
You were never a home for me.
Nor were you a sister, or a friend.
I loved you like I love music, like I love the way rivers surge forward after it has been raining for days, the way I love the sea.
But there was always a difference, I suppose, although I couldn't see it-
For Nature cannot hate. It is, only is,
And my love for you
Was
In much the same way
It was, like a stone is, like the trees are, like the sunlight is.
But you weren't, aren't. You are flesh, and you
Are ruled by feeling and, sometimes, by fear.
I see you now and I know I should hate you
For when you walked away from me
You confirmed every fear I'd ever confided to you.
You took a larger chunk of my soul
Than I had even thought was left, just then,
And I mourned you
Like you had died.
I still remember.
I will always remember.
I sat on Rachel's broken armchair
And I cried for hours
Unable and unwilling to speak.
She stared at me, grief stricken with her own loss
But through it she stared at me as if witnessing a great mountain cave in
Or the sea
Suddenly boil.
She stared and stared, and I shook apart, pieces of me flying into all the dusty corners of that apartment.
I'm sure some are still there, sharp and jagged, ready to cut a foot or tear a hem.
I had thought myself incapable of grief like that anymore
And yet there I was, my soul rejecting itself like a bad transplant.
And yes, I was angry at you, so angry at your cowardice,
So maddened to be left again to try to make sense of a mess somebody else made with no warning
And no
Apology.
Weeks later I asked you why
In a last stand of sudden strength I accused you
And in refusing to tell me you confirmed my suspicions that it was
Your fear and not my wickedness
That lost me your love.
I saw you as such a meld of energies, fierce and delicate all at once
And moons and suns decorated
Some of the most beautiful art I've ever created.
That style died with you. You have the first and last of it.
Sometimes I wonder if you've burned my paintings, or else thrown them away. I don't know. I hope not.
If you ever truly look at me again
You will see that my hands have a white scarlike design of a sun on one thumb and a moon on the other
When I clasp my hands they form a perfect circle.
I couldn't sleep, you see, remembering how you wanted to erase me
Wanted me to erase you.
Everything important in my life leaves a mark
And even if you never speak to me again these hands will make beauty, will spread kindness, will carry loads
And they will bear your mark, for I was so changed by you and your sudden cruelty that for a long time
My own hands looked so... foreign
And would create nothing lovely, nor touch anything gently, nor hold anything fragile.
So much time has passed,
And yet when I saw you again, here, after all the ways my life has changed since then
I knew when you refused to look at me
That you did care
Would always care
Would always hate that you cared
And I gazed at you
Because although I can't say I love you as I did
I would be dishonest to say that I don't. I always will. I always did, really. I chose you. I saw your self loathing and the depth of your beauty and I chose you
To know
And I paid the price I sometimes pay to know people like you.
And I still consider it worth it.
I find I am still partial to your voice
To the lines of your face-
The face I longed to draw, because it reminded me, still does, of some mighty greek heroine.
I still admire how you move, and I still laugh at your jokes when I overhear them, although my face remains unchanged.
Sometimes I am brave enough to search for your gaze,
Sometimes I stumble on it suddenly and it immobilizes us both, and I look away, although I wish I could stare you down and force you to, instead.
Sometimes I think of doing something small and nice for you
Because the desire never really leaves me once I care for someone
But I can never discover something you wouldn't trace back
And I admit I fear your anger.
You told me to leave
And my pride will only let me try so much to give to someone who scorns my kindnesses.
And so there is this odd, unsettled, unresolved feeling I get
Walking these hallways.
I dread and crave
To walk around the corner and see you.
When I do my muscles thrill with fire and ice, ready for a fight, ready for a struggle for my life
And I placidly look your way, force my gaze to slide over you as if you are ordinary.
Know that you are not. That you never will be.
We are so similar, inside.
Reading your poems tonight I cried because I miss your friendship,
But mostly I cried because I understand you
The lost wolf, pretending to be lone
The lonely little girl with fangs.
I understand how much you must loathe yourself, how much feeling you must bury each day to be as you are
And
As all true friends do
I wish you wouldn't.--
I wish you well. I wish you happiness. I wish you all good things. And it makes me sad to see you in the hallways
Because I know that as long as you cannot forgive me for having loved you
You haven't forgiven yourself for being loved.

I cry missing you, too, you know.
I never know how
To tell you.
Because it is always when you're
Happy
And I just
Can't
Ruin it.
It's when you're out somewhere laughing
And I wait for you to come back
That I feel how far away you are.
Or days
Just days when I am alone and silent
And maybe I just don't feel you through your words
Like I usually can.
And eventually I can't do it anymore
And I sit down
Head in hands
And cry because I can't touch you
Because I can't look at you.
It breaks my heart in a new way
One I've never felt before
And have never grown strong against.
My only real strength is in anger, and
There can be no anger in it
Because you are still mine, and I yours.
There is nothing to be strong against, just the waiting, and some days I can't bury it deep enough
And tears well up.
I miss your skin.
I miss your eyes and your soft hair.
I miss your voice in my ear.
I miss holding your hand.
And I don't hide it from you,
Far from, I tell you every day as you tell me.
But this...
This sadness.
I don't want it.
It cloys at me.
And I don't want it
Cloying at you.
And so sometimes I still sit in it and cry
Because you aren't angry with me
And you love me
And you speak to me every day
And you're the most wonderful person
I've ever met
And you're
So far
Away.

It is raining
And the sky is gray but it holds
A sort of secret light
A brightness that lends a pearly quality to the falling drops.
It is a lovely, quiet radiance
And it reminds me of you.
In my head I see your face
Your moss green eyes, wide and framed by long dark lashes
Your hair, wild and reaching, the way it stirs in the wind and bounces when you laugh
Your white body in the darkness
A sliver of bone in moonlight
Strong and soft at once, smooth and unblemished, almost liquid, almost velvet, almost light.
I wonder
How the years will make you lovelier
For I know they will.
I see your beautiful hair
Gone silver like spun spidersilk
Falling in ringlets past your shoulders.
I see the forest in your eyes
Grow tall and reach for the heavens,
Gold and green mingling as ever, just as vibrant, just magnetic.
Something about your eyes in a face full of the carvings of laughter and tears, marked by every love and loss and sunny day,
Something about how unchanged they will be
But how much more complete
Makes my heart swell.
I want to see you grow like a tree, like a forest.
I want to see every way you change.
And I know that someday those fathomless eyes,
Young and old at the same time, like the trees,
Will look at me with doubt, with chagrin,
That you will wonder if I want you
As you age
That nothing I say then will be able to convince you completely that I do,
And it makes me smile sadly.
Because as I sit here gazing out the window, seeing in my mind's eye how you'll change,
I can't think of anything more beautiful and more inspiring
Than watching you grow old
Next to me.