Sometimes I think life is about learning to get as close to what sustains you as you possibly can, without ever touching it. That seems like an appropriately beautiful, tragic way for the universe to work. The moment before a kiss is always excruciating and incredible. The memory of a lover is always unbearably sweet and terrifyingly hazy. The silence right after a song ends is always heartbreakingly sacred. What if life is about not touching the things you love?
I'm not sure I could stand it if I knew I was right.

And at night
My mind screams your name...
Oh, darling
*You've got to go.

Don't give me Never's and a mouth full of Forever's,
I know your kind.
You are human and
Us humans speak in grandness by starlight
But wake in the gutters of our lives
Unsure of how we got there.
We give because we think, "Oh why not?"
And when the Why Not becomes apparent
We change, like the tide.
Don't talk to me about how you
Will Never wish me gone,
Will Always want to hear me speak.
There is no guarantee, not even for you.
Don't make those promises to me,
And do not make them to yourself-
You are only what the world has made,
And the world makes nothing permanent.
Don't speak to me in Never's and Forever's.
Don't patronize me.
Don't give me a blanket statement, that has (seemingly) no expiration date
Just so that each time you meet my eyes you do not have to face how your heart is inside that second.
Don't speak to me in Grandness, in Permanence.
Only tell me that Now, on This Day,
You are not tired of me
Yet.

You are going to drive me the rest of the way to insane, aren't you?
Alright. I've already hit a tree once this year. Bring it on.
I'd go anywhere with you.

Give me your hatred. I will make art of it.
I want to be happy, but I do not need it:
Any fuel will do.

I miss myself,
And it feels queer, because
I never really liked her
Anyway.

I named the moon after you
And every time its gentle light touches me
I catch some of it
And burn for you like an ember.

Someday your prince will fall.
I've got all the time in the world.
I've been sleeping for a thousand years,
And I can rest a thousand more,
Wrapped in dreams like thorns to protect me from his looming shadow.
All the words you say that he refuses to hear,
All the secrets you confess that he takes for granted,
All the times you know he is not true love but take him anyway,
They rise like the tide.
And maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe you'll spend your life where you're "supposed to be",
Because it's eaaaasy,
Because, after all, having a prince wins you so very much
In this backward world.
But I'll be here, quiet as the stones,
Here in the dead of night and here in the harshness of day,
To love you exactly as you are,
In the dungeons of your soul where the cruelty lives,
And to the top of the highest soaring tower, gleaming in the sunrise.
Nobody will love you like I do. Nobody will sacrifice for you, like I do.
For,
You know it not, but-
It was I who kissed you awake,
And let somebody else wear the armor
So that I could, for a fleeting moment,
Feel you skin to skin.

"It's okay."
Yes, darling, I believe it is. When I look at you, I believe it is.

careful there
darling
you know what comes
of touching lovely things

I want to miss you fully, properly.
I want to look at photos of you and smile.
I want to be able to trace the planes of your face with my fingertips
And love you quietly
Full of joy instead of full of pain.
I am not there yet.
I ache too much for you.
It feels like every molecule of me is being pulled and blurred and bent towards you, wherever you are,
And I try not to think about it.
I try not to think about it because photos of you
Do not make me smile.
Not at first.
They stop my heart.
They stop my breath, and for a moment I don't exist because the longing has become so vast that it unmakes me.
I just can't win with that, it seems-
When you kiss me, I am unmade and remade.
When you leave me, I am unmade and remade.
And you wonder why I told you
That you hold the earth in your hands.
You might as well
For it seems that all the gravity I ever feel comes from you.
I love every line of your face
Looking at it
Seeing your eyes sparkle with that soul behind them
But its loveliness absolutely breaks my heart.
It hurts. It hurts to miss you, now.
You've been gone too long,
And if you aren't coming back I want to skip this part-
The painful, wrenching part-
And move on to when I can look at your picture
Trace your features with my fingers
And smile without wanting to cry, as well.

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.