Your words
Are my home.
I live in them
As you live in me-
The little ghost of loving you
That cries out in exquisite joy
And pain
At being close to you
But never close enough.

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.

"Wow. No wonder everyone's in love with you."

Well, what am I to say to that?
How can I possibly explain
That I know I am loved,
And the terrible truth that it doesn't really matter
If it's not the *right love-
From you, or her,
Or a handful of scattered people
Whose pain has touched me in the deepest way
And made me want to touch it back?

To be loved is what we all want, right?
And we shouldn't be picky, I'm told,
But I am.
Sometimes I wonder if I imagined my love, anyway.
The moments I've felt,
With few and far between
A special person here
And there,
To send sparks down my spine like wire
And set my heart ablaze with sizzling light.
Sometimes I wonder if I made them up,
These people I chase after,
And that they don't remember
And so of course they do not spare a glance
For the strange girl with the dark eyes
Watching them with hope
And awe.

I can't be what you want from me.
I feel it in your fingertips.
I see it in your eyes.
They look like fire beneath ice,
Behind glass,
Hot, melting, but water and fire,
They hate one another.
How ironic that your eyes
Portray your soul the way they do.
Did you feel it from me?
I shied from your need-
Greater than I could possibly fill.
Not quite true,
And the guilt stings inside.
But I quell it-
I know you'd never want my lies.
But what else could I do?
I can never resist giving when I can give.
It's my fault,
Weak in my compassion,
For failing to see that by loving you
I doomed you
To love me too.
You'll never be the most, my dear,
And doesn't it hurt?
It hurts me too.
There aren't many who'd deserve it more than you.
I can love you in a thousand ways,
And god forgive me,
I am so terrible at clarifying them.
And some of them
Are locked from you like treasure
And I fear they're all you covet.

A kiss is like a conversation. It can be as short and sweet as hello, or goodbye. It can be a long argument full of anger. It can be a soft whisper of comfort, or a sharp demand. It can be shouted like a joyful whoop, or murmured like a private confession. Kisses are much simpler than words. We need less to say what we mean.
A kiss can say, I missed you, I need you, I adore you.
It can say you hurt me, I hate you, I forgive you.
It can say don't leave me, I'm sorry, please console me.
It can say come here, I can't live another moment without you next to me, breathing is not important.
A kiss can say things for which there simply aren't translations, for no words encompass the meanings.
And let me tell you one thing. When a woman kisses you, she is always saying something. You have to hear her, you have to listen, else how will you know what you've just said back?

What I'm saying to you might sound like "Please stay, I will die without you."
Sometimes it sounds that way to me, too.
Sometimes I peek into the caves of my mind
And my footsteps echo it back to me like rain.
But that
Is not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that I know I will have such joy in my life.
I know in my bones that I am not going to waste this chance I've got
To feel things.
I am certain that my life will be not just happy,
But spectacular.
I will never be safe, I will never be bored, I will never give up, I will never
Settle.
What I'm saying to you is that
I want you in that.
I want you to be the reason.
For a while,
Or forever.
Your choice,
Your freedom.
What I'm saying is much more than "I will die without you."
No,
I will be exquisitely alive with or without you.
I'm no fool, I know that.

What I'm saying is,
I'd rather it be with you.

Today I saw a photo of you
Holding a little puppy and smiling
And your hands were in its fur and I looked a second too long at them
And I found myself thinking how much I love your palms
And the creases in them
And how soft your fingertips are
And how you are one of the only people
With hands smaller than mine
Small and perfect and smooth, like a child's.
And the force of how much I love you
Crept up behind those thoughts
And crashed through in a wave
And I looked away, chagrined,
Embarrassed to have such beautiful thoughts
About somebody who won't even speak to me.

What fills your mind when storm clouds flood your eyes?
Blue eyes, too
And sometimes you'll sit in exquisite stillness
And just gaze
And shadows will pass across your face
The way high flying clouds cast dark patches upon the lonely fields out west,
And I just have to look at you.
Your face is...
Achingly lovely.
That precise phrase.
When I look at you in passing, by accident,
The porcelain perfection of your skin,
The glinting depths of your eyes-
Full of secrets-
The way the light casts the shadows of your cheekbones along your jaw,
Your symmetry pierces me
And I gasp air
Like I've been hit hard
Because in a way, I have.
What is in your head?
You remind me of the sea.
Vast. Deep. Free.
Calm on the surface
And contained chaos beneath.
Brutal but unapologetically wild,
Sparkling but guarded,
And...shockingly lonely.
That is what I see in your eyes when you lounge, lithe, in that ratty old chair
And endow it with a smooth-lined grace it could never even approach if you didn't occupy it,
Arm draped,
Face dark,
Eyes brooding,
Like a sculpture that came alive one day,
Stepped off her pedestal,
And left the soaring, silent museum hall for the scathing disarray of the real world.
I wonder...
Does it disappoint?

There was a girl up on stage a moment ago
Who looked like you.
Just a little.
Just enough to catch my eye.
It was when she turned slightly and the lights hit her face a certain way
And suddenly it was your face
Your hair framing it with curls
Your eyes with the smile born into them by their shape alone.
And I caught my breath.
I couldn't look away.
I loved that girl for a moment.
Loved her till my heart broke.
And then she turned her head and you were gone
And I had to collect myself
From little pieces on the floor.

A kiss is just a kiss.
Unless it's not.
Your hands are only hands,
But they're not.
Not when they're tangled in mine.
There is nothing else in my life that fills me with such joy that I think I will disintegrate
Just because
How can flesh and blood and bones
Possibly hold a feeling like that?
I tell you you're killing me
But that's what I mean.
It's not the fear that I'll lose you
That makes me wonder if I'll live for another minute.
It's the bliss that you are near me.
It's not what it sounds like-
It's not pain.
It's so much joy that my hands shake.
I don't think we were made-
Fragile as we are-
To feel things like the things you make me feel.
When you touch me,
I am unmade for a moment,
And it is exquisite.
Maybe you think I see you through pain and fear
But those
Are only my defense
Against the idea that I could feel so safe, and so complete,
And so perfectly happy that
The smile in my heart could break every bone in my insignificant shell of a body
If it were to crash over me in full.
Maybe I'm scared of that,
Of the fact that when you look at me
Every part of me, down to the atom, thrills with electricity.
Maybe you think I hate myself, abused and tossed aside,
And that is partially the truth,
But when you look at me and smile
I love every cell of me
And they all love me back
And together we decide that nothing that can be touched with fingertips
Is possibly vast enough
Or durable enough
Or beautiful enough
To hold the feeling of looking back at you.
A kiss is just a kiss
Unless it pulls you apart by the molecule
And lets the light shine in on all the little tiny spaces between.
This body is no instrument fit to play the song I hear when I touch you.
This beating heart is no vessel for how alive I feel when you pull me closer.
I am too tall not to fall to my knees and gaze up at the lines of a face I love madly,
But I am too small to hold that love
Far
Far too small.
That's what I mean to say.

I bet you think I know no anger like yours, love.
Oh, but it's just not true.
I know the anger of pride.
I know the hatred of righteousness.
And you know only the indignance of the broken.
The strong are angry in a different way, you know.
The whole, who have paid their price in blood to be so,
We know a rage without end, without shores
A black roiling sea.
It is careful contained most of the time,
For we have worked hard not to need it.
We know its power. We know its brutality.
We know it knows no remorse.

So when you needle the part of me that's proud
That it rose from its ashes
And clawed its way through funeral soil to light,
Tread lightly, my foolish dear.
Understand this:
That I never lied when I said all things have their balance in my head.
That I told you true when I said that for every love there is equal hatred,
Every kindness equal cruelty.
The capacity for one makes the other exist.
And so think now, back on all I've forgiven in you, in everyone.
Think now on my quick absolution of every sin, no matter how offensive.

Let me tell you a story, before you say "Talk to me when you've realized you're playing the victim."
Let me tell you a nice little fairytale from my past, all rosy with age and remembering
But still sharp.
Let me tell you-

Once my father fought with me. He said, "You're always playing the victim."
And he told me to go home
In the middle of an enormous city.
In my 6x tee and little black shoes, I cried.
But not for long.
You see, I didn't sit down and take it,
I went home.
I called his bluff and as my mother turned her car around to drive back to the train station and hug me close,
He said, "Call me when you want to see me again."
And stormed out,
And I sat and waited, swinging my little black shoes
Because my feet didn't reach from the bench to the floor.
When Mommy came and scooped me up,
She cried because I'd been alone.
But I didn't cry anymore.

And I didn't call him for a year.

Where we live the sun is green.
The birds are singing and the ocean is shining.
But it's okay because we forgot how to feel.
And then the ice cream started to melt.
Because you need so much time to write.
(And I love listening to you sing.)

We are still
Young
We are so ******* young.
Life is racing by
And it feels like we must be finished
Growing up
But it’s not true.
We are so young.
I am unfinished.
Hindsight is 20/20
But darling
I spent so much time reading
The poetry of your skin
That I’m nearsighted now-
I see only you, larger than life
Because you’re so **** close
And
When I look forward I see only hazy shapes
And things to trip over.
You know me better than anyone
But
I wish I could tell you
That that’s not saying much.
I wish I could tell you that I’m sick
Wish I had blood to show you,
Or skin and bones proof,
Wish I had an X-ray or a doctor’s script
To prove to you that I have lost control
But
I’m sick in a way that you can’t see.
You only see the shadow of it
And I get to look at its face
Days in and out-
Its face is what I imagine they were afraid
To write in the bible
About the devil
And it’s lookin
Right at me
All the time
And when you touch me it sinks its teeth in
Because it wants my joy to be its venom
Instead.
I wish I could show you
That if my outside matched my inside
I’d be in the ICU
Full of little clear tubes
Breathing through a soft engine.
I wish I could tell you
It’s not your job to find a cure
For my mind
That
I just want your love
I just want you
Here.
I don’t wanna look at that face
Days in and out
Without your hand in mine
To steady me.
Your fingers feel like the moment right after your chair tips
And you thought you’d fall but you didn't.
They feel like
“Thank god.”
And I don’t know how to ask you
To be my chemo buddy
As I drip acid into my ink veins
And try to heal from a disease that will never **** me
But will always be about to.
It’s hard to heal
When your treatment is heavy volumes of war instead of peace
And I don’t know what I’m doing.
Please believe me that when I speak
Nothing is a lie
That I never know if my demons will pull my puppet strings
And make me a hypocrite
And then retreat like shadows to let me take the rap
Alone.
I wish I could show you
The IV that pumps insults into my blood
Things I’ve seen in people’s eyes
In yours
Things I’ve heard fall- surprise!- from my lips
Like poison dripping from fangs I didn’t know I had.
I wonder
If a snake bites itself
Does it die of its own venom?
It sort of feels
Like that.
Please believe me
That I don’t want to spill my secrets to you
Like someone sliced my stomach open
And let me bleed them out everywhere
Please believe
That I am sick
And I am not faking
And I am not trying
To hurt you
Or lie to you
I am only trying
To be.
I’m just trying to be
And it’s a hell of a lot harder
Than it looks.

Of course it’s work-
People say that word like it means
Pain
But
I am not suffering.
I’m building something-
It is holy work
It is the only sacred thing,
The only war
Worth fighting.
The only oath
Worth keeping.
The only sacrifice
Worth making.
I have been pure and whole
But I have not been meek.
Why pledge yourself to a god whose only promise
Is that he will never touch you?
If you’re going to take vows,
Give yourself to skin
Give yourself to joy
Give yourself
To love
And **** the rest.
If you’re going to belong to someone
Belong to them with your whole being
Every little corner.
I vow to chase this feeling until I can’t run anymore.
I vow never to be satisfied.
I vow dignity through pain.
I vow courage in the face of defeat.
I vow sweetness when spite would taste better.
I vow to do my own
Sacred work
And if I pray it won’t be on my knees
But with my lips pressed to the forehead of someone
Whose eyes I want to drown in.
I vow to keep reaching for this world
Until my hands are too scarred to feel
And if I choose to worship anything or anyone
I want that faith to leave a mark.
I want it to burn.
I want it to pierce me to the core
And leave me new.

My entire life
The world has told me
To be satisfied with what I get.
To be quiet.
To be gracious.
And my entire life
I have needed more
Wanted more
Been...
Hungrier
Than anyone else I have ever met.
And the world said
Be satisfied.
And the world said
Be silent.
And so I learned to fit inside it.
I have been taught to need less.
I have been obsessed
With needing less.
The world has said
Be satisfied
Do not demand
And in my quest to please it
The only answer I have found
Is to never be satisfied.
To be quiet
To be hungry
To need, and never ask.
What I get, I rejoice at.
What I am denied, I never covet.
But give me something and ****** it back
And you will find that it was much more important
Than you ever thought.
I have been conditioned
To be silent.
But I have never been
Satisfied.
I need.
And I have never seen my needs met.
And I have learned to live this way
But only barely,
Only by my fingernails.
The world said
The more you need
The less power you will have.
It said
Be satisfied.
Be silent.
Be gracious.
Be
Sorry
For your hunger.
It said
Do not demand
And as hard as I have tried
I have
Failed to obey.

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.

You are beautiful, brilliant, talented,
But when I look at you
I wonder if you are happy.
You used to bring light to the whole room
With your joy
And now when I look at you I think of rain.
I love rain,
But you don’t.
Shadows pass across your face so often now
Like rolling clouds
And it scares me
Because I know that the storm which stirs my blood
Poisons yours
And I don’t wish it for you
But I see it in you.
Like recognizes like
And I see your darkness
The opposite of mine
Cold and weathered
A world you get lost in and swallowed by,
A burden you endure but cannot flourish beneath.
You were always sunlight, warmth, like springtime made flesh.
You were always alive in a different way from me,
A way that I loved you for
A way that I thought must be so vital to you
If it could be so nourishing for everyone who met you.
And now I hardly see you happy anymore-
When you smile it looks brittle, and vanishes quickly.
That mesmerizing light
So unquenchable years ago
Gutters like a candle in high wind
And its frailty is a wound in your eyes.
I see the weariness in your face
And your beauty has grown so sad-
No less captivating, but sobering, forlorn,
Somehow heavy.

I look at you and I no longer see your joy to be alive
And I wish
Quietly
Passionately
That I could somehow bring it back for you.

"Everybody thinks you're crazy."
How much does a phrase like that hurt?
Almost as much as what it means.
Acid, eating through layers of your skin,
Slowly burning down to the marrow of your bones.
"Everybody thinks you're crazy."
Doesn't matter if you are or not.
Who's to say I'm not, after all?
But that it's said, that it's believed.
You have no right to think it
If you haven't lived it.
Ever felt like ripping your own skin off?
Ever writhed in the night full of screams that won't sound
Even when you try?
Ever sat in a quiet classroom and wondered if this next moment you would sob?
Ever had your heart beat so fast and hard, for such a long time
That you worried it would fail for real?
Ever seen a doctor about it?
Ever begged someone to help you and had them not believe?
Ever been so afraid that you wished you were dead just so it would stop?
No?
Then shut the **** up.
You know nothing.
"Everybody thinks you're crazy."
Must you twist the knife?
Must that make me nothing?
You fight to ****, darling.
You do
And I don't.
Is that why everybody thinks I'm crazy?

I often think that the only redeemable quality about human beings
Is that you may love one.
All the greed and cruelty and abuse,
All the mindless, pointless politics,
All the power mongering antics of the higher-ups
And the pervasive ignorance of the masses-
Sometimes it makes me wonder
What we are even for
If we are on this earth and choose to pollute it
And refuse to learn from our mistakes,
And avoid responsibility instead of helping those who suffer,
And cut corners so that some may be rich today
While the rest pay the price tenfold in fifty years.
We are a people of billboard ads
Our greed 300 feet tall
On the side of every highway promising
**** girls
And new cars.
From far off we are millions of empty business suits
Headless and heartless,
Puppeting through streets and behind desks.
I have never taken full ownership
Of my humanness.
Humanity- that is another story-
We have come, in our vanity, to associate that word with
Kindness, empathy, and emotion,
But from a big picture point of view,
Those concepts have no place in the description of humans.
I have always rejected, to some extent,
My fellowship with these people
That I spend my life near.
There is something other about me to them,
There is something other about them to me.
But, like many toxic things,
Humans
Are addictive.
Humans are a drug I can't quit.
And I look at all the destruction we cause,
And the horrors we invent and implement,
And the injustice we ignore,
And I wonder why I have such faith in me
For my foolish race.
And all I can think of is that
There is only one reason that we are allowed to exist,
That we are at all redeemed for our crimes,
But that that one reason
Is immense enough to hold:
When I wonder how anyone could justify us as a whole
All I can think of
Is that the only truly wonderful thing about human beings
Is that you may love one.

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

There's totally something to be said for that.

Now is just now.
Now is not then.
Now is not will be.
Now is only now.
It's only now.
And I can live through now
Knowing that now will soon
Be then.

It has been a long time
Since my hair has held the scent of cigarette smoke
From the sighed stories of a girl who has seen too much pain
And not enough tenderness.
It always comforts me
To wake in the morning
With that little reminder
That for once I showed love without
Destroying anything.

Being gone isn't at all the way you'd expect it to be.
I mean, when people think "gone", they think nothingness.
Some fear it.
Some see it as a sweet relief,
A pliable dark numbness.
But it's not that way, at least not for me.

You see, when the world has faded away,
And everything in it is ghostly and already seeping from your mind,
There is a strange feeling that comes over you.
A knowledge.
You have no mind, anymore. No body, either.
No heart to ache,
No voice to speak with,
No fingertips to feel with.
You'd think that that would be utterly terrifying. And I suppose it is, at first.
Until you realize that you also have no limits.

It is just your essence, all around you, and imagination takes hold.
I firmly believe that you need no mind to imagine-
It is in the soul, not the body.
Things stay with you, memories that have etched themselves into what you are.
These are not in the mind either,
They never were.
At first, when you've realized all this, and it's only just sunk in,
There is only darkness, and you wonder if it will ever be different.
Eventually, you aren't afraid of the possibility that it won't, but you can't quite grasp why.
That's when things start to change:
Nothing can ever stay the same once you are comfortable with it.
The darkness seeps away, and something starts to form.
A light, a luminescence...

And just as you end,
You begin all over again.

You have to make your peace with the fact
That some of the most beautiful things you will ever create
Will be made in the names of people who don't even know about them,
And could never come close to appreciating the feeling behind them even if they did.
Your choice as an artist is,
Will you let that make your art less beautiful,
Or will it stand lonely and exquisite, because something in it is only yours?
There is a difference between loving someone and what loving them creates in you.
A person can leave you, can ignore you, can forget you, can misunderstand you.
But the art that you create in their name will never do any of those things.
This is your time to choose
Whether you hold what you create because of love as yours,
Or let someone else own-
And possibly destroy-
Something it's likely they haven't even truly looked at.

Every morning, when I rise from my bed
I let your ghost
Settle in me.
I touch the necklace I wear every day
The necklace I plan to die wearing
And whisper,
"I love you."
Because I've tried hate-
It tastes
Like bile.
I've tried hard at hate
And I just love you
Too **** much.

When I leave my house and lock the door,
I turn away and look to the sky
And I whisper,
"I love you."
Every time you cross my mind,
I say it like a prayer
Because you are gone
And I cannot pretend I don't feel it
Anyway.
I look forward and...
Life is flat, like a comic book page.
Greyscale, like a cheap newspaper.
But I will color it with your name,
With my memories of you.
I will make things grow.
I will make them solid.
I will make them mean something
By loving you.

When I leave this town,
I will touch that necklace,
And say,
"I love you."
When I leave this state,
I will stop to think of you,
Take it off and watch it glitter in the sun,
Turning, turning,
Throwing shards of silver on the dashboard of the car
And I'll think your name,
Say to it,
"I love you."

When I leave this country,
I will take a deep, steadying breath before I step onto the plane,
Look back at a ground I've never truly learned to uproot myself from
And clutch that pendant,
That charm that reminds me
That I am always yours
And a part of you
Belongs to me,
And I will say,
"I love you."
Before I go
Even if I know you will not hear it.
I will say it,
But I
Will still go,
Missing you with every step I take.
And someday, when I leave this life,
Even if I have grown old and grey never having touched you
Again,
I will leave this life
Saying
"I love you."
And you can leave me.
And you can forget me.
And you can blame me.
But you cannot
Stop me
Loving you
And you cannot keep it from my breath
From the rhythm of my steps
From the beating of my heart
From everything my fingers ever touch and create
From every morning and evening of my life.
When I think of you,
I will touch that necklace
And whisper
"I love you."
Because I know
Finally I know
It is no use not saying it
When I feel it.

(You're beautiful.)

Your passion undoes me.
I felt like kneeling at your feet.
A thousand times I almost did,
And caught myself before I could
In startled chagrin.

And how is it that I am supposed to live in this cold world for however many years are left with the absolute knowledge that a mere feeling can **** me?
Are my days numbered, and I cannot see it? I began to wonder that
As soon as I could think again.
Because my first thought beyond the pain was, "If this ever happens again I won't have the strength to survive it twice."
I thought I'd regain it, you know?
Recharge
Like a battery.
I thought that time might replenish what I had depleted in myself in order to continue breathing.
But I find,
Shockingly,
Nearly two years later that I am just as fragile underneath,
That the loss has lessened none.
My energy is still sapped, my soul still brittle,
And I am afraid
Afraid with every fiber of my being
Because this happened once,
And I felt the certainty in my gut that it could ONLY happen once,
That I would not survive it a second time.
And I thought that would change, if years were to pass.
I thought I would again become durable enough to take such a fall
And be so fragmented.
But I'm not. I'm just... not.
I am different. I always hated myself for the weakness of my heart
And lo and behold, it is even weaker than it was
And it appears that nothing builds it back up.
I am still as certain as the day I crawled to my knees finally
That if it were to happen again to any extent
It truly would **** me.
I am DANGEROUSLY exposed, still,
Like a raw nerve. So easily damaged. My god, I am defenseless.
If this happens again, that's it for me.
How ******* STUPID is that? That I have never tried to **** myself,
Never even let myself want to,
Through all the **** and against all the odds,
And yet I might still die-
Maybe even SOON!-
Of a ******* feeling
And have no say in it whatsoever.

I wait for you
Like a tree waiting for the rain
Like a seed beneath snow
Like the birds wait for dawn
Like the wolves wait for moonrise.

I wait for you
Like a breath held
Like an unfinished thought
Like a step almost taken
Like a dissonant chord.

I wait for you
Like sustenance
Like peace
Like salvation
Like an answered prayer.

I wait for you
Like a tree waiting for the rain.

The rain is making the grass grow thick
And blossoms push through the bark of every tree
And the wind is warm
And the ground is sighing its relief
Because you are home
Finally
And home is
You.

I love your eyes.
I love your long stories
And your husky laugh

When it comes,
And it always comes,
Do you steel yourself,
Tense up like a coiled spring?
Do you fall to your knees and let it break over your head?
Or do you take a deep, calming breath,
And invite it cordially,
Like a familiar friend you may sit down to tea with?
The answer defines you.

When it comes,
And it always comes scalding,
I level my gaze-

*Hello, old friend. Do you take sugar with your heartache?

There is a type of perfect summer rainstorm that exorcises the heat from the ground in billows of mist and makes the world hazy.
The lightning sets the trees into relief and every so often a little light leaf will float to the ground.
The thunder rumbles, the sky crackles, and the clouds are leaden and low in the sky, brushing the treetops.
The rain makes it look like they are falling on you when you look up.
It catches in your eyelashes and strokes the side of your face with little rivulets of water, it plays in your hair and swirls around your ankles, a warm melody.
I met a girl once with eyes like a rainstorm.
Their steady gaze has never left me, for it felt like standing in one to meet it.