I won't love you like a man will love you.
I won't love you
Like a woman will love you either.
I wish I could say
I fit something I knew a word for
In terms of love.
But no.
I will love you
Like the ground loves the rain after a drought.
I will love you like the moon
Loves its little glimpses of the sun
As it slips behind the earth again,
Lovers
So similar but so different,
Never in the same place at once.
I will love you
In terms of Nature
I will love you
In terms of
Universe.
But
I cannot love you in terms of man
Or woman
Unless you mean
All that either has ever been.
And I think I should apologize-
I think you should know that
If you think this is different because I am a woman,
That's not why.
It is different because I am a cyclone,
An earthquake,
A natural disaster of hurt and hope,
And I love you like the planets love the star
That gravity bends them towards
And that
Is not how any man or woman I've ever met
Has loved before.
And I am not sure if I will ever meet another one
Like me.
And I am not sure
I would even want to.

You've carved me like a river, love.
Don't you see?
You touched me and I caved like a landslide,
But you kept on.
Slowly you cut a path through my heart,
Down, down,
A chasm, a rift, down to the core,
Hard and sharp like rock
Worn down by white water.
You've carved me deep, love...
And still you pound through my veins like rapids.

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.

Sometimes I love you so much I can't breathe.
You're always there now, on the edges of my mind.
You're like a light that falls on every thought I ever have-
You don't ever obscure anything, you just make it all clearer,
Brighter,
Better.
When I feel sad, the thought of you flits across my mind like sunlight on the water
And I feel warmer.
When I am about to fall asleep your fingers drum my heartbeat
And I am at peace.
And I,
Lying in your arms
Skin to skin
Soul to soul
Lying in silence for the first time in five years
My demons not just silent but shrinking,
I can't help it-
I know I could spend my life like this.
I know I could be content to come home to you,
Not even that,
Not just,
But for you to be
What home means.
In those dangerous, quiet hours of the morning
When your breath tickling my neck makes my heart ache with joy that you ever took a breath
And the smell of your hair lulls me into dreams of your smile
I dream in waking as well;
I admit to myself
Just how serious I am when I murmur that I love you
Just how deeply I've fallen already.
In those moments
I know that you are already
Home to me
And I can brush the thought aside when I am too scared to let it live but
The proof is in the way I ache to leave you when the morning comes.
I hurt inside when we kiss goodbye at your door,
You bleary eyed and wrapped in a blanket,
Me being tugged away by a world I am increasingly, blatantly
Uninterested in
If you aren't there to light it up.
My life nags at me like a whiny child
And I push its greedy fingers away.
What is life when there is love?
What is the work you do to pay your bills when there is the work you can do to feed your soul?
There are wounds healing in me that I didn't know I had,
Wounds that protest feebly when I turn away for the stairs.
What is a house I grew up in
When all it holds for me are memories of so many nights
Wishing for what I feel when I'm with you?
And yet I know we are young and afraid,
Caught in the tide of this enormous world
But the strength with which I feel that we can conquer it is staggering
If we can only reach one another, tethered by the wishes we've never dared to speak before,
Holding on with fingers that have slipped away from too many perfect days
And hearts that have bled for too many lonely nights
If we can only remember the breathless shock, that sudden certainty that the eyes we gaze into could be our port in every storm, our deepest comfort and our own sweet joy reflected,
If we can only decide
Unequivocally
That the chance to be happy like that is worth the risk of losing it
We will not lose,
We will not fail.
The light in our eyes that burns for each other cannot go out
If every time we close them we reach for it.
I can't know anything, can't be sure I really have seen the future that I dearly wish for
But I can promise that every star I see
Every night
Everywhere on earth
Will bear your name to me like a wish, like a prayer.
I can say with certainty that its lilting melody will escape my lips unbidden
Every time I round a corner and see something that reminds me of you
And leave a smile there.
I can swear to you with every piece of me that you
Are in my skin
That once I've said the words "I love you",
They can never be undone.
What I'm saying is that if someday you choose to fade away
If even in our passion and sweetness and devotion
Life sweeps us out of each other's arms for a time
I will love you until the day I die.
I looked at you the other night and knew it suddenly
The way I always know.
I knew that if I live to be 100, I will forget my own name but remember your face,
And it made me so wrenchingly happy
And so gently sad, somehow.
Because I can't know.
I can't know if I will always be worth the risk,
If all of our efforts will pay off.
A hundred thousand things could change us and our world...
But I do know
Me.
I know me and I know that the biggest, most permanent gesture of love I can give you
Is to let every second I spend with you change me like it does
To let every touch you give me leave fingerprints
Mould me into something new and better.
I will open my doors to you
Every one
I will let you run your fingers along the dusty, light starved parts of me
I will lead you through the rooms of my heart I've kept locked away
A shrine to brokenness
And I will see you throw the curtains open and let the sunlight make them glow anew.
And that way whether your stay be forever
Or tragically brief
Everyone who ever meets me
Everyone who loves me or my art
Everyone who passes me on the street and thinks my smile is lovely
Will meet you
Will admire you
Will
Love
You
As well.
That is my gift to you
The best and most complete I have to give.

I woke up to a morning hazy grey
And drew a shaken breath beneath your ghost-
It hangs, a husk, upon my bedroom wall
A shriveled flower, tinier than most.
It's tangled in a web of woven cords
That maybe I will see you in my dreams
And when I do, my consciousness recoils,
For love is not as gentle as it seems.
Last night I saw your sparkling eyes again,
And woke predawn with tears upon my cheeks
I hadn't even noticed they were there
Contented as I was to be asleep,
But when the dream was shattered so was I
And lying there alone among the dark
I heard the rain tap softly on the glass
And I struggled, quiet, not to fall apart.
And just as I was curled into a ball
To calm the ragged hole inside my chest
I caught a glimpse outside of shining streets
Where winter ground was by the summer blest.
I had thought you took rain with you when you left-
It hadn't fallen since you flew away
I thought you took the warmth, as well- bereft,
I'd gazed out on a thousand bleak white days,
But here outside my window was a gift
A burnished silver street spilled on the ground
And golden branches reaching from the trees
And fine white mist billowing all around.
I peered out from the safety of my bed
And saw the world transformed beyond the pane
Your footsteps have not graced this ground for months
And yet it had been silvered by the rain.
And for the barest moment I could breathe
Although you may have cast my love away
A peace descended, gauzy like a shroud
And silently I hoped that it could stay.
The plant beside my window sighed its blooms-
Jasmine blooms at night, I'm sure you know
And in the blackness white flowers festooned
The pillows and the sheets like lacy snow.
And in my questing fingers they were silk
In contrast to yours, brittle on the wall
They still smelled sweet and, suddenly compelled,
I forgot my tears and gathered up them all.
Their perfume sticky on my hands, I prayed
For the first time since the winter months began,
"Let me find my happiness somewhere,
Let me feel it to remind me that I can."
I prayed to thunder, lightning, and the storm
That rages in my bones, chaos and light
I prayed to the cold clarity of the rain
That trickles through my veins, blindingly bright.
Something heard me as I whispered there
The wind spoke back to me against the glass
And I reached out my hand to feel the cold
Of water, loneliness and ages past.
I always wanted to become a storm,
I've always cried much easier in dreams,
Admiring the freedom of the fall
As droplets pelt the sidewalk and it gleams.
This morning I slept peaceful, just the once,
That sweet low rhythmic murmur overhead,
And the ache of missing you was not severe
But neither, for the moment, was it dead.
Good morning, darling, I've forgiven you
Each day of silence gouged into the walls
And today I breathed my own forgiveness too
Beneath the falling rain's hypnotic drawl.

Sometimes when it gets dark
I scroll down my friend's blog.
She wants to **** herself.
I want to tell her I won't see her in hell.
That those pictures of starving women, all bones with skin stretched across like canvas
Aren't lovely.
They're obscene.
She makes me feel so mean
Hating her like I do when I see another silent moving picture
Of a girl swinging from rope
And another self indulgent sentence or two
About how she wishes that was her.
I want to tell her she hasn't earned her right to give up.
That nobody has.
She makes me wonder if I am cold and heartless,
Or just a self-hate survivor.
I remember feeling like I'd already died
Underground in the silence of all that dirt
Thinking it should be more peaceful than it was.
I never gave up.
I suppose maybe the reason I hate her so much
For her indulgences
Is not that I see myself as better,
But instead the lingering impression that when I was that way
I was the weakest
Most abhorrent
Most useless little smudge on the cold silver mirror of living,
And I still kept on.
Maybe it's not that I think I'm better than she is
But that I know I was worse
And I don't want anyone giving up
When they're all stronger than me.
Don't want to see a quitter more capable than I am
When I- even I, the pandering puppydog weakling-
Never gave in.

Well, as fun as all this was, at least I'm fast on recovery now.
Like riding a bike.
The body just remembers, I guess,
The horrible, traitorous thing.
The ears remember to ring
The stomach knows just how to clench
The head can spin all day long
And those hands
Do some truly impressive shaking
All so that the eyes can shed a couple of tears
As a result of all the trauma and sickness
And the heart doesn't have to open
Just
The ribcage.
It all remembers,
Being tortured by you
Is like
Like riding a bike.
The body knows how to suffer.
But at least it remembers how to peel itself off the floor as well.
I've got to say
The recovery's impressive
The timing
Way less than years prior.
The body has learned
Even if the mind hasn't
I have to say, props to muscle memory.

Since the sun first rose and spilled its golden light like nectar across the darkened fields.
Since the night first whispered soft along the ground and painted it deep blues and purples.
Since the rain first fell from the stars, and, gentle, infused the world with some of their light.
Since the moon first hung, pale and luminous, above the night muted world, filling the cracks and crevices with an echo of dawn.
I have known you since wind first breathed life into the trees and swayed them in their eery dance.
Since winter first chilled the world and hid its life away beneath the unyielding snow, and since spring first battled it back with the valiance of warm rains and sunny days.
Since thunder and lightning first hurled the the sky at the frosted ground, and cleaved the heavens in two, stripping away the world’s soft lines of defense.
Since the first balmy days of summer sighed into the mind and burst upon the senses like the sun captured here on earth.
I have known you
Since the clocks first caged time from its wanderings,
Since before the world was small, when wonder still waited behind every corner.
Since the veil between reality and dreams was just a dream itself.
Since the oceans first caressed the shores and ripped away leaving battlefields of ravaged shells.
Since the rivers first glowed crimson in the last rays of sunset, and since the seraphim first sprinkled dew upon the spiderwebs at daybreak.
Since before such ****** concepts as Good or Evil were picketed upon each creature,
Since nature ran wild and stopped at nothing,
Since the darkness first crept into a man’s heart,
I have known you.

I think I know why you ran...
I remember sitting at your kitchen table
Confessing how I wanted to see your face
When you are older
When laugh lines have carved it and silver has touched your hair.
And you said
Quietly
That you didn't know if you would live that long.
I understood what you meant
And I took your face in my hands and kissed you
And I never thought to tell you-
I thought you knew-
That I would rather spend a year with you
Than the rest of my life with anyone else.

What you see in me
Is someone who is so used to isolation
And so good at disguising it
That to be present in the world is a surprise.
Everything rushes in
Everything touches me all of a sudden
And I am overwhelmed.
I don’t know if it’ll ever go away.
I don’t know if I want it to.
It brings a certain strangeness out in me
As I struggle to contain and conceal
Not my otherness
But my sudden immediacy.
I feel the floor pressing up against my feet
And the soft turnings of quiet things in the ground so far below it.
I feel the sea.
I feel the past and its whispers.
I feel the way a tree must feel
When struck by lightning.
Somewhere an artist carves the face of a statue in a quiet room
And something new is born
And I feel that.
Somewhere someone flings their arms wide
Leaning out across a railing over the water and laughing as the wind holds them up
And I feel that.
Somewhere lovers find each other for the first time
Somewhere a child learns a new word
Somewhere, someone tired and peaceful breathes for the last time
And I feel that
And that
And that.
It rushes in,
It all rushes in.
At once I am painfully in place
And scattered across the world
And it all swirls through me.
I am so used to being silent inside
And filling the space with music and words
Petty distractions and safe thoughts
But
Suddenly
If I had a thousand bodies and souls it would not be enough to hold all this
And I am disoriented
Like I’ve been thrown into deep water only to realize I can still breathe somehow.
It is that confusion you see in me.
It is the memory of before
Of having been everything and nothing all at once, forever,
And then suddenly contained-
I had forgotten,
But part of me remembers every time I see you
And it is always a surprise.
I don’t know if it will go away.
I don’t know if I want it to.
It’s why I miss things,
Why I can’t focus,
Everything in the world calls to me,
And everything in me sings back,
“Please don’t let me go again,
Please let me sink my hands into the earth and grow there
And never feel alone again.”

It’s a hell of a lot to act normal through.

Tonight, I could feel the nausea bloom in the core of my heart
Like it usually does when I think too long on your silence.
I could let the withdrawals start,
The shaking and the fear.
I could ask myself
Has she forgotten me?
Did I drive her away with my honesty?
Why can I never shut up?
I could torture myself
With the notion that tonight you consume someone else's lips
And think nothing of me,
Glad to be free of my adoration.
I could crucify my heart,
Nail it down with the possibility
That you see everything I say and choose never to respond.
I could.
But tonight,
Oddly,
My fear is tableaued behind frosted glass.
I can see the outline of my agony
All blurry and dark
But I can't touch it.
It's like one of those sliding shower doors is between me
And it
All rough on one side so that nothing can really be glimpsed
And all the more foggy with the steam of the years just boiling off me.
My pain can't see me, naked and exposed,
And I can't see it, menacing and razor sharp.
We know about each other, but only by the shadows.
It is out there, outside in the substantial world,
The one with hard lines and cold facts
And a biting breeze that keeps the brutal windows clear as crystal.
But it is warm in here and I have found a sort of spiritual nepenthe,
A numbness.
I know my torment is solid; I know that eventually the cruelty of my mind will have its pound of flesh,
(And perhaps more)
But...
Not tonight.
It's not real to me tonight.
And frankly
I am
Just too ******* tired
Tonight
And too clean
Tonight
And too calm
Tonight
To slit my pride's throat
And watch the blood run down the drain.

There it is, the mirror sky, reflecting all that is beneath it and throwing it back upon itself like rain.

The flowers unfurl with alarming swiftness-delicate, they are, made of shadow and moonlight, flourishing in the dusk-and the tides rake the shore with desperate fingers, wrenched back from the land as the night pulls the day down under the water. The sun sinks crimson within the glass sea, cracking it, and it shatters into a million stars trapped inside a harsh black sky. The shore is littered with a desolate battlefield of broken shells, scarred bits of wood, rocks beaten into smoothness by the unforgiving water.


Where is the moon? There is no softness here. Hard lines, the world washed black and white, and such a stillness even in motion. The sky does not see a moon, and so the moon is gone-trapped with the sun beneath the black sea? The last shards of fiery gold and red have been swallowed by unnaturally silent waves.


Where is the life? Every creature is gone, hidden away. It is not the night that they fear, but the image of themselves reflected inside it. The world does not sleep; it waits, coiled like a spring, for whatever is coming. It is as if everything is holding its breath, silent and full of tension.


The sea isn’t alive like it should be anymore. It’s been tainted, poisoned. Why do the waves shine black and blue like a raven’s feather? Where are the whitecaps and the foam? No, this sea is smooth glass, flowing and morphing, licking cruelly at the shore. Cold as ice, but not frozen, it leaches the color from the world, drawing all the light into its frigid depths. Look down inside it and there is nothing but hard blackness, as if the water is solid now but still moving. The silence is perhaps the most terrifying. Wrong, for the world to move so fast and be so quiet. The clouds and the stars all move dizzyingly, racing across the sky, growing and changing before a real form can be discerned.


Now even the stars are going dark, falling one by one into the sea, a sad parody of rain. They are swallowed instantly, their cold lights extinguished until not one is left. For one long, silent moment, everything is dark. How long does a moment in utter despair last? A day, a year, a thousand? It is impossible to tell, with the unchanging quiet.



There it is, somewhere above, the mirror sky, reflecting itself. For that is all that’s left- darkness reflected in hallways and tunnels and funhouse mazes.


Until the moon slices through, and everything shatters. Shards of darkness fall and change, hitting the ground and seeping color into the soil. The waves crash upon the shore, released- still brutal, still cold, but free and deep cobalt blue under the golden moonlight. The wind sighs, the trees rustle, the grasses bend and sway with the whisk-whisk sound of silk on silk. Thunder and lightning roar and flash as the sky hurls itself into the sea in a torrent of bitter rain. The world is awake with a vengeance, and the moon reigns, full and golden and glorious, over the deep purples and soft blues of the night.

I woke up in the dark
Early in the morning.
I felt the hum along my skin that meant
You were next to me.
It was quiet
And in your sleep you were breathing hard.
I could feel the tension in you.
I'd never seen anyone so out of breath in a dream.
You sounded scared. You felt scared,
Next to me.
I opened my eyes, careful, and your half-shadowed brow was creased with...
Worry?
Fear?
Pain?
I couldn't be sure. Maybe it was nothing, but...
I felt for you, in that second.
You looked so young. You looked so hunted.
I almost shut my eyes again, unwilling to invade upon it-
Sleep is such a vulnerable thing, such a private thing.
I almost woke you with a kiss
And forced you to know I was there.
What if you were suffering?
What if you were terrified?
I almost woke you, right then,
And disrupted that strange, innocent rest-that-wasn't-restful.
I almost woke you because I couldn't take it anymore.
The way you were gasping air like you were dying.
I reached for you, indecisive,
Fingers hovering above your shoulder as if you were a flame I was getting too close to.
But instead
I steadied myself, pulled back.
And I took your hand, real soft,
And I just held it,
Making little circles with my thumb on your palm.
And I breathed with you,
And then slower, calmer, deeper,
In my head saying, "Shh, it's okay."
And I sent my love through my fingertips
To yours.
And I stayed like that, just breathing,
Trying to reassure you without you ever knowing it.
And as I did your breath slowed
And the strain left your body bit by bit,
And my heart broke a little
That perhaps I caused that.
That maybe in your head you'd been in pain
And maybe I had helped you breathe a little easier.
And I lay back down, carefully, gently,
And closed my eyes again
And let the warmth of your hand in mine
Comfort me
And the thought that maybe I had comforted you
Sustain me.

There it is, the mirror sky, reflecting all that is beneath it and throwing it back upon itself like rain.

The flowers unfurl with alarming swiftness-delicate, they are, made of shadow and moonlight, flourishing in the dusk-and the tides rake the shore with desperate fingers, wrenched back from the land as the night pulls the day down under the water. The sun sinks crimson within the glass sea, cracking it, and it shatters into a million stars trapped inside a harsh black sky. The shore is littered with a desolate battlefield of broken shells, scarred bits of wood, rocks beaten into smoothness by the unforgiving water.


Where is the moon? There is no softness here. Hard lines, the world washed black and white, and such a stillness even in motion. The sky does not see a moon, and so the moon is gone-trapped with the sun beneath the black sea? The last shards of fiery gold and red have been swallowed by unnaturally silent waves.


Where is the life? Every creature is gone, hidden away. It is not the night that they fear, but the image of themselves reflected inside it. The world does not sleep; it waits, coiled like a spring, for whatever is coming. It is as if everything is holding its breath, silent and full of tension.


The sea isn’t alive like it should be anymore. It’s been tainted, poisoned. Why do the waves shine black and blue like a raven’s feather? Where are the whitecaps and the foam? No, this sea is smooth glass, flowing and morphing, licking cruelly at the shore. Cold as ice, but not frozen, it leaches the color from the world, drawing all the light into its frigid depths. Look down inside it and there is nothing but hard blackness, as if the water is solid now but still moving. The silence is perhaps the most terrifying. Wrong, for the world to move so fast and be so quiet. The clouds and the stars all move dizzyingly, racing across the sky, growing and changing before a real form can be discerned.


Now even the stars are going dark, falling one by one into the sea, a sad parody of rain. They are swallowed instantly, their cold lights extinguished until not one is left. For one long, silent moment, everything is dark. How long does a moment in utter despair last? A day, a year, a thousand? It is impossible to tell, with the unchanging quiet.



There it is, somewhere above, the mirror sky, reflecting itself. For that is all that’s left- darkness reflected in hallways and tunnels and funhouse mazes.


Until the moon slices through, and everything shatters. Shards of darkness fall and change, hitting the ground and seeping color into the soil. The waves crash upon the shore, released- still brutal, still cold, but free and deep cobalt blue under the golden moonlight. The wind sighs, the trees rustle, the grasses bend and sway with the whisk-whisk sound of silk on silk. Thunder and lightning roar and flash as the sky hurls itself into the sea in a torrent of bitter rain. The world is awake with a vengeance, and the moon reigns, full and golden and glorious, over the deep purples and soft blues of the night.

It's that knotted ball of frustration that lives just behind my sternum
That drives me to do art.
It's like an itch you can't scratch.
It gets excruciating.
And you claw at other things, outside things,
Because you know you can't reach inside your chest and squeeze your heart until it caves in.
It's... sort of like that.
My art is all a release of this maddening...frustration
That I can't get to what I need to really dig out of me
No matter how hard I try.
The tension just builds up and builds up until it's paralyzing,
And then when I can't stand it anymore,
All this creation comes spilling out of me
In a futile
But at least active
Attempt to release whatever's trapped in my soul, rattling the bars.
It never works for long- I never breathe free for more than a second.
But a second
Is better than nothing.
That's why I never have time for anything:
My time needs to be spent
On those seconds.
Getting them,
Repeating them,
Sustaining them.
I need to devote all of my energy to relieving this pressure.
There is no room for anything else.

A blank page.
Filling up the room.
Filling up my eyes, my thoughts, my fingertips.
A clean slate.
Ever try and clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before.
You're right.

Somebody wiped me clean.
Took my words away.
But they remain. They show through.
They are beneath my skin, moving, swirling,
Letters and symbols and words all running like ink veins beneath translucent flesh.


I am a blank page, filling up the room, filled with what I never said.
What I couldn't say.
It beats like a drum behind my eyes, across my thoughts, inside my fingertips.
It tells me, Go. It says, Be first. Be strong for the first time in your life. Be strong without something to force you.
I tell it to be quiet, and it pounds within me like it's locked inside and the air's run out.
It pounds at the edges of me as if I  put the doors there and locked them.
I didn't.

I imagine that if you were to look at me and really see me, every word would run along my face like water, like tears,
Crawling across my collarbones, twisting round my wrists,
Black ink veins, pulsing.
Pounding.

Because isn't that what we all want?
To be the one who leaves, if it means we won't get left?
Isn't that always easier?
To leave the old behind to rot in the same place, frozen like a photograph, and find somewhere new and exciting to forget them?

I do not forget. My memories are like tattoos.
They flow along my sharp cheekbones, the crooks of my arms, the insides of my thighs.
Words.
Black and accusing.
Black and permanent.
I am a newspaper soaked in rainwater, the words bleeding through the thinness of the flimsy page.
I am a blank paper, but not really.
I only wish I was.
It is the first time I can remember when I have not been in pain, but have still wished for relief.
It is the first time, outside the madness of grief and anguish, that I have knowingly and truly wished to be...blank.
To be wiped clean.
To be white and new and unmarred again.
To remain that way.
To touch nothing, and be touched by nothing.

Today I felt the water rise cold and clear to my waist, and my mind was empty.
The next moment, the next breath, that was all I needed to know.
And in that I realized how deeply I wish to turn off my thoughts.
How truly tired I am of living with print running along my body.
How I wish that every moment I wasn't stamped by my emotions, marked, owned, crushed as if by an old heavy printing press.
Today for a moment I was cured of a disease with which I have lived my entire life, and so not known I had;

Thought.

How I wish to think of nothing, to FEEL nothing but the moment.
For they are the same,
There is no separation of mind and heart, although they seem to clash.
My mind feels and my heart thinks, and they both descend upon me constantly with demands and criticisms,
The red pen to my black ink story.

Once I tried to do my own editing,
But I'm afraid I only made a mess,
Red ink ran down the drain and,
Quick as a lightning strike and twice as terrible,
So did everything I loved.

I never want to be a soaked newspaper in the gutter, rain pouring down and tearing the pages, too cheap to pick up and throw out properly.
I never want to be that again.

And so I decided to leave the red pen to my inner editor.
And yet it hurts more, the sting of knowing that I am merely a vehicle for a printed story.
I may have a say about the wording, the artistry, the format,
But I have no power over content,
And no way to keep the page clean.

A blank page, I used to say,
An opportunity.
And now I wonder if maybe it wasn't.
If maybe a clean page is not an invitation.
If perhaps instead of a chance, an empty page is a plea:

"Don't."

I've chosen to spend my life worshiping it.
I used to lay in the sun for hours and let it make me know.
I could never tell anyone what it was, because there aren't words for it.
Sometimes I'd cry because I didn't have enough power over language to explain how I felt.
And then when I grew up, after I'd acquired all these words, I finally realized that I never would.
Joy is a solitary experience for me, like pain.
Because neither can be explained to someone else who hasn't felt MINE.
I miss the me who noticed, who had time to.
My childhood was nothing but a giant discovery of the world.
Good and bad.
And at some point I had the moment when I could have chosen to let the bad spoil the good.
But something, thank god, made me see that they needed each other.
And after that all my joy broke my heart it was so big.
I want the whole world, I want to be the same as it.
Always have. Always hurts, not to be quite close enough.
But the kind of hurt that drives you to do beautiful things.
I don't think I'll ever choose a faith.
My religion is that I am alive
And that the people I love are, fragile as thistledown on the wind, and we were all blown together to the same time and place.

There's a girl in my class named Nicole, who used to act just like every other popular girl.
She wore too much eyeliner and straightened her hair and I always heard the gossip.
I saw her for what she looked like, and I stayed away because I hate the drama that follows the "popular" people like smoke.
But then her father died.
Her mom was already dead, and her father died.
Now she calls herself Cosmic Bliss and wears jeans vests.
She doesn't straighten her hair,
And the other day she got up in front of the class and read her report
And it was all about seeing the world as a gift,
And helping others,
And finding yourself through nature.
I admire her.
She lost everything, and I remember for a long time she was broken.
She didn't look broken when she read that.
I suppose it's like any other faith- has its flaws.
But people are so resilient.
I found myself clapping for her in solidarity, because hey
If your parents die and your life ***** and you get beaten down,
If you want to make flower crowns and call yourself Cosmic Bliss
And preach peace and love and crystals to your peers even when they give you funny looks,
Do it.
I will cheer for you.
I wish I was friends with her.
People do what they have to to live.
Some people.

Here I am,
A silly little human
On this silly little planet.
And I have these...
These incredible experiences.
I have these earthshattering nights
Gazing into someone's eyes like they're galaxies
With my heart crashing against my ribcage like the tide.
I have these spiritual awakenings,
These end-all blossoming moments of total wonder,
And I could eat the world,
Swallow it.
I could be all of it
And it wouldn't encompass what I feel.
And I'm just this...
This little ant, here,
On a marble
Crawling with millions of other ants
All having experiences all over the place,
And I'm really not that unique at all,
And nobody really cares in the long run,
But god,
Spending a night in your arms rearranged me by the atom.
And that's pretty big
To me.

“You sure do worry a lot.”
You’re not wrong there.
I worry
That you’ll see through me
And that you won’t like
What you find.
I worry
You’ll get bored with me
Or tired of my constant passions,
My midnight thoughts and my
Searching.
I worry
That you’ll be afraid of me
When you finally realize
Who I am,
That you won’t
Want to know me anymore-
That you’ll take back this fragile intimacy
This connection
And I will be
All alone again
But with a fresh memory
To hurt over.
I worry
That you’ll think
I can’t meet your eyes
Because I’m afraid of you
Or because
I am a liar
When really
I am struggling with myself
Afraid of my loneliness and my honesty
Afraid that in betraying myself I’ll betray
You.
I’m worried
I’ll wake up one morning
And you’ll have vanished like the ghost you say you feel like
Disappeared
And that I will be
The haunted one
Struggling to adjust to the bitter emptiness you would already leave behind in me.
I have been there before
I have had the dark
Pour into my chest like black water
Rushing to fill the space
Of someone suddenly gone.
It felt like
Drowning.
Please, be gentle with me.
Please, don’t forget me.
Please, forgive me.
I am trying
Not to worry.

I saw a picture of you today
And I thought,
"You are the most beautiful person I've ever SEEN."
It took my breath away.
I love you.
I am in love with you.
When I am in your arms
Nothing else matters.
When I see your face
I melt with joy.
When I think of you
My soul glows with awe.
But darling
I know I am okay, underneath all that desperate love.
I know I am. Somehow.
There's a bit of something there
That never was before,
Something solid.
I am so glad
That sometimes I have a lucid moment
Within the insanity of loving you.
Not-
Never!-
When you are next to me,
For then I can't imagine even breathing without being near you.
But when you are absent,
When you are absent
Sometimes I am not sad
And I'm thankful I've discovered the duality
Of worshiping you
And enjoying my life without you always in it.
And it's not perfect-
I've spent a lifetime fearing this change.
My life has said to me,
"To let go is to forget, and to forget is to lose everything.
To trust is to be unprepared for damage.
To breathe is to allow a weakness you can't afford."
There are many many moments when your silence
Chafes at my wrists like rope,
When I panic, drowning in the loss of you
Even though I know it isn't a permanent one.
But...
There are many moments, also
When I think of you and smile
Even though I know you are not thinking of me
And that
Frankly
Is much more progress than it seems like.
That is more faith and calm than I've ever been able to offer someone
I'd bring down the stars for.
I am working for this.

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

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.

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.

You'll leave scars on my hands--
I promised you.
Just wait.
And everyone who ever holds them
Kisses them
Or glances at them will see
The evidence of you.
Try to force me to forget you
And I will put you on my skin.
Control
*That.

You say I don't have to worry.
When we were laughing, happy,
And I said, "I'm trusting you."
I meant in all things.
When I sealed it with a kiss,
I meant
I am trusting you.
Trusting you the way I have only ever trusted
One other person.
One other,
Who dragged me through hell and repented,
Whose every ugliness and cruelty I saw and accepted,
Who I know better than I know myself.
It took that to trust her,
It took seeing every corner of her for me to give her
What I am handing you right now.
You are still shrouded in secrets, in uncertainty.
I've not seen your darkness, only heard that maybe it exists.
In so many ways
I don't know you.
But looking into your eyes
I trusted you
And I trust you
And here,
Here you go:
Here is every night I lay awake, my stomach twisting in knots,
Fearing that you'll forget me.
Here is every morning I wake up
And try not to bother you too soon into the day,
Fighting the irrational panic that if I don't hear that you exist
You'll have been only a dream.
Here is every midnight I will spend wandering in the cold
Looking for ghosts of us together in the dark
Wondering what you are doing halfway around the world under the same moon that paints the snow silver here.
Here is every doubt I have.
I trust you.
Here is my faith.
It is never given lightly.
But I love you.
And since I do,
I have the choices:
Trust you
Or don't.
I will love you either way.
I will fear you either way,
And what this trust means is that
I have found a new kind of courage.
When I am sad, or scared,
When my day has raked me over the coals,
When I am forced to my knees, and have to get up all alone,
I will allow the thought of you
To comfort me.
I will let you in
In my darkest hours
And let the light that fills up every inch of me when you touch me
Return without you
And warm me.
You may never know what this means from me-
You've not seen me guard myself like a fortress for eighteen years.
You've not seen me refuse to let anything comfort me
In fear that if I rely upon it
I will lose it and be unable to survive.
You've not seen me suffer silently, grimly, stubbornly
For months
Just so I will have done all the getting-up
Myself.
This trust, this faith,
This is the most precious thing I have.
And I gave it to you,
Laughing.

It's quiet now.
And there is this feeling that's been with me my whole life.
It's like the whole world is with me, in my heart.
All the ages all together.

The earth is sad.
Not in a desperate way, a young way, but in an old way.
The kind that settles in you.
Eventually it becomes an obsession.
It's more beautiful and meaningful than anything there is.
And the ugly things make the world sad.
They have to be there, to keep alive the wanting, and the waiting.
The longing and the wistfulness.
The lack.

Existing is all about knowing what you're without.
When forever looms in both directions and you can't possibly hold all the feelings of everyone who's ever existed,
That emptiness is what makes it possible to feel all the joy and pain of everything that's ever been.
It's beyond anything one person could feel on their own.
It has to be borrowed, because I've never done anything or seen anything to make me so happy or so sad.
This is the feeling that makes me alone.

I don't need the light
To see right under your skin
Down to the heat
Of your soul.
I don't need to be next to you
To touch you like your skin is silk.
I know you can feel it.
I know you're scared.
I know you don't know.

I know.

I know I don't need to be standing
Two inches away
To look at you like I want every breath you've ever taken
And every word you've ever thought.
Every inch of your soft skin
Every tone of your voice,
Murmured or sung.
I see you like you're bathed in candlelight
In my mind,
Your shadows are velvet and your glow is amber
And your pull is strong,
Heady like the perfume of jasmine.

It blooms at night,
You know.

I don't think I wanted you because I couldn't have you.
I wanted you because
I thought I would die
If we weren't next to one another-
Tangled right up, held-
Just at that moment.
I don't need to have you
To always want you.
I don't need to love you
To adore you.
I don't need to know you
To miss you.

I know you feel
That I am not what you've had before.
Undiluted, unrestrained,
Unapologetic.

I know
We could forget
We could forget what's good and bad
What's wrong or right
We could forget to remember why
We
Aren't us.

I know
You know
I could turn your world inside out.

Will I?
No one knows.
But I know
I want to.

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

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

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

I couldn't breathe for joy, suddenly.

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

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

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

I wanted to kiss you yesterday.
Not because I love you.
Not because I even know you that well.
Not because I'm even sure yet
That I want to know you that well.
Just because I wanted
For once
Not to be the fool, hanging on the coattails of a girl who didn't care.
I wanted not to care.
Watching the smoke curl from your red lips,
I imagined consuming them,
Not bogged down by love or fear or longing,
Just lust,
Just simple.
You could do, you could do it,
Make me forget for a little while
That I am always second best,
That I have no power.
But I didn't kiss you yesterday.
I might have, but I didn't.
I am not raw enough yet,
Still too hopeful and too naive at heart,
Or perhaps too sage, in fact,
To pull the wool over my own eyes and pretend I don't know
That she is the only one
I really want to touch.

I don't have hope.
I don't do hope.
I have calm. Calm is better.
I have a knowledge from somewhere in my bones that it will be okay.
That even if everything I've spent all this time worrying about actually happens,
I'll be alright.
It may not be pretty,
And it may not be the happiness I long for,
But whatever happens to me, I know I will survive it.
And that gives the girl who spends much too much time stepping back and giving others what they ask for a peculiar edge:
When everything that I fear has happened,
And I should be broken,
That is always when I stand the tallest, and let pride put steel in my spine.
I don't have a secret weapon,
I am a secret weapon.
Because although I long to be content, I was made to be tested.

And whether I like it or not, I test well.

Sometimes when you have been away for a while, or when I've felt you shut me out, my wanderings through the night change.
I used to be sad when you would fade away.
I used to mourn you over and over, every time you retreated from me
And came crashing back like the tide.
But now...
Maybe I've just lost too much these past months
And have no mourning left in my heart
Clean, like the leaves are after a long brutal storm,
Maybe I am simply tired after this life of longing and loss, but as I walk, every shadow takes something of me with it.
Every glittering pool of lit rainwater
Every flower holding darkness like a mist around it
Everything I look upon, everything that touches me
The heavy, wet air, the soft ground, the dull charcoal sky, the trees with bits of skeleton beginning to show beneath their flames of leaves,
They take what I need gone from me.
They take who I am, the person who loves you,
Until I am just an outline of myself,
Just the sketched lines of a person, so faint as they kiss the cheek of the night.
Make me new.
Make me velvety black like the sky. Take my complexities, the twisted knots of my desires
And spread them across the land like a spiderweb.
Let them snag the fat tears the moon leaves in the grass when dawn banishes her.
Let somebody else worry.
I wander until I am truly alone. Until I am lost.
I am not myself by the end. I am not anybody
And a strange sort of bliss seeps into me with the shadows and the quiet: Ah, finally.
I breathe in the moonlight, let it light the planes of me that still exist with its iridescent glow.
And although I know I will return, come rushing back the way the sea rushes to fill every footprint on the beach...
That is then, and this is now.
For now I am a breath not taken,
A sentence thought but never voiced,
A moment missed in the blur of the world going by.
And I am happy to be so.

One of my most treasured talents
Is my ability to at once be passionate
And jaded.
I can write you prose that drips with longing,
Love,
Ardor,
But if tomorrow you walk away from me,
I will have quietly, calmly
Expected it the entire time.

It's like being trapped in glass,
Frozen without even a breath
You wait to be smashed
To be released or destroyed,
And the waiting is agony.
It hurts like being paralyzed.
No move can you make
No word can you say
No scream gets to the surface.
It's all locked inside,
Happening but not happening.
It does more damage in than out
But you are suspended,
Hardened into immobility,
Encased in silence.
And you wait. And the waiting is what really makes you weak.
The longer you are here,
A paused person, a heartbeat halfway done,
A lung half full of air,
A step almost taken,
The longer you are frozen, the more brittle you become
Until the flick of a fingernail can shatter you
And leave you dust upon the floor.
And you know it, and you wait,
And it will come.
But when?
And really, which is worse?

I don't know when I started loving you.
I know when I realized
I could.
I knew when I first spoke with you that you
Were someone I could love
Devastatingly.
And since I have studiously looked past that knowledge,
Ignored it even though it sat beside me at the dinner table
And put its cold arms around my waist in bed.
I protected you from it,
Keeping it a ghost for as long as I possibly could,
Even as it gained substance at my side
Pulling at my sleeves and tangling its soft fingers in my hair--
"Look at me."
"No.
No I will not see you."
But one night, some night,
I must have been tired and weak,
I must have been raw
And, having heard another of your shocking tendernesses
Reaching through space to tug at my heart,
I must have turned
And seen it in full-
My loving you-
And since
I have been gorgonized, stone,
Unable to look away.

I'm doing it again.
I'm missing the point.
I need to open myself to this world
Not like a flower that blooms only at night
Not cautiously
But entirely.
If I am going to do this
I need to do this.
I am still afraid.
I can feel it seizing up my heart,
Making me huddle in around it as if something from the outside is hurting it.
I need to pry my arms away,
Unlock my ribcage and breathe deep,
I need to say
I will accept every outcome.
I need to remember
That I have come far
That there was a time not long ago
When all this armor hadn't even been imagined
Never mind forged.
When I crawled exposed through the embers
And emerged whole
Anyway.
I need to remember that I have come far
And that I am going farther.
I can't stop here
Just because something has finally made me feel.
I need to accept.
Accept that I may be let down
But that I can't prepare for it.
Accept that I could lose everything I've dreamed of
But that at least I had it for a moment.
Accept that
I may never know why I get only fleeting nights of happiness,
Just enough to whet the appetite of the starving soul in here.
If I am going to be vulnerable
I need to be vulnerable.
I need to do it all the way, no holds barred, no fears held,
Nothing.
I need to drive my misery away when I am ignored.
I need to dissolve my terror when I am forgotten.
I need to have faith that if all this time
Through all these months
She couldn't forget me entirely
That I am not so easy to shake off
As I think I am.
I don't know if I can do this.
I have never tried it.
I've been told all my life that it is foolish
But I've been shown all my life
That it is the only way I will be happy.
I need to give everything I have to this world
And then
I need to trust it not to take everything from me.

It seems hideously unfair-
And how gauche of me to utter it,
Nobody says it,
Even when we all know-
That some people
Are just more important
Than others.
Not for any real superiority
But for the fact that
We may love some
But not the others.

I think sunlight must be running through my veins
I feel like honey and wine
I feel the way I used to feel
In the mountains
In the bright warmth
Air so pure it made you dizzy
And the sky like a blue blanket
Soft and inviting.
Being with you
Laughing with you
Feels like sitting on the porch during a heavy rainstorm
Watching the chaos
And breathing in the scent of damp wood and stone
Safe from the cold and the wet
Clutching a cup of hot chocolate.
Being with you feels like
Lying on a foreign beach
Under a cloudless sky
And fearlessly letting the sun kiss my skin
Mind hazy with heat and contentment
Hair made wild by the water and sand.
I haven’t felt safe much
In my life
I haven’t felt whole
But I feel it with you.
I feel like I belong here when I’m with you.
So often I am an observer, a bystander, someone who records
Beautifully
The world
But cannot be in it
And cannot be touched by it.
When you touch me I remember all the times I’ve ever felt real
All the times I’ve been truly reached by anything.
If there is a home for me anywhere on earth
It is this feeling
And it lights me up from the inside,
Rolling off me in waves
My joy to live
My joy to be
It’s back, it’s here,
And while it stays, I bask in it like healing sunlight.