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.

Sometimes I try to walk like a rainstorm.
As if little tendrils of lightning
Spark along my skin,
Twirl in the ends of my hair,
Arc around my waist.
As if my steps are drops hitting the ground
Staccato
Heavy
Full of life and anger.
As if my heartbeat is a roll of thunder
Thrum dum dum
That reverberates in my bones
Like a gong struck.
Like my eyes are full of those little
Jewels of water that
Cling to the grass blades and spiderwebs,
And not tears.
As if my breath is a river
Fed by them- those gems of cut agony-
Rushing constant and steady
Down through the soles of my feet:
All that electricity
Has to go somewhere.
So sometimes I try to walk like I'm
A rainstorm
And pretend the world will take it
From my fingers and my lips,
My steps.
Pretend that, like the rain,
The overflowing of my soul will feed the Earth and seep inside
(And not run along it
Slick and alien like oil.)

Outside the window, the rain beats a battle hymn.
The sky is raging, throwing itself at the cold, lifeless ground.
We are caught in between, you and I, in between life and death.
The rain, so full of passion, against the frigid, icy world.
Fight! Win!
Tomorrow the ground will be soft and muddy, the remnants of grass visible for the first time in months.
Tomorrow the dawn will break upon victory.
Tonight, the battle rages on, and the thunder roars its insults at the apathetic cold, and the lightning strips the world of color and sears away the winter’s numbness.

I can't touch anyone else anymore.
I stopped trying.
It used to be okay.
I used to fuel it with a bit of anger and pass it off as excitement.
But...
If somebody were to kiss me lately
I think I'd just turn away.
I think I'd try to hard to lean in and forget, but in the end I'd know I couldn't do it.
I used to have the odd person that I'd flirt with or cuddle with,
I used to even have someone I'd kiss often, and forget it wasn't what it could be.
I tried, hard.
I failed.
And finally after trying and trying,
After several last ditch attempts,
I've decided that this is it.
That if you won't be near me-
And maybe you won't-
Nobody will.
I'm tired, and I'm brave enough and wise enough to know when I've been cornered by my feelings.
I can face being alone.
And if I have to, if I can't have you,
I will accept nobody else.
I have no interest, and I'm done trying to.
Whether you hold me or walk away,
I am yours,
And there is nothing either of us can do about it now.

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.

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.

Yesterday,
It was dark and the day was long gone.
And next to you, I felt a chill, even as you snuggled closer.
Your fingers under my jaw, and you couldn’t see my face in the blackness.
Couldn’t see the tears that threatened.
I could have let you.
I could have gone with you, where we used to go,
To a place where neither of us felt the sparks,
But neither felt alone.
I could have given you what you wanted.
But I couldn’t.
I could have tasted your lips and thought of her,
Closed my eyes and tried to pretend.
I could even have tried to erase her, like a shadow on my memory.
I could have lost myself in the feeling of being loved, wanted, accepted
By somebody.
But I couldn’t.
I know what it feels like to have someone touch you and your skin is on fire,
Your breaths quick
Your heart fluttering
Your soul yearning to give them everything.
I know that feeling inside out now.
And to let you travel my body, my soul, and feel nothing but a numb ache for someone else’s hands, someone else’s lips, someone else’s love…
That would be unforgivable.
So I stopped you.
In the dark, I let the cry seep into my voice,
I let the tears slide down my cheeks,
I could have stopped them too.
“I’m not okay yet. I’m not okay.”
It wasn’t a lie.
It was simply the gentlest way of telling you that you aren’t the one.
The one that I am in love with,
Whose touch I will never feel again.
The one I ache for deep in my heart whenever anyone touches me in any way.
I want to throw their hands off, refuse their hugs, shy away from their skin,
Because they are not her.
No, no, I am not okay.
And I did not lie when I said I didn’t know when I would be.
I don’t know IF I will be.
I hope, all I do is hope, and wait
For the day when I don’t wake up to the stunning pain of having had real love yanked out from under me,
For the day that maybe I can sleep the night without sobbing awake even once,
For the day when I find love with somebody else.
But honey, my dearest friend,
My truest friend,
I can tell you almost certainly that it won’t be you.
How I wish it would be, how easy it would be to love someone who knows exactly what it is I need,
Life doesn’t work that way.
Yesterday you touched me gently, with more tenderness than I deserved,
And yesterday I shrank from your touch,
And lay in the dark with my tears and my memories and my hole in my chest that I try and breathe around,
And waited for the dawn to dull my pain.
Knowing all the time that my hope to love you was false,
That nothing is ever so easy.
Stay with him, stay with someone who will choose you first.
Yesterday I found a new way to cry,
Because my solitude isn’t easily broken,
Because who knows when someone will make me feel alive again,
Because these wonderful beautiful people want and love me,
And that means nothing in the face of how I loved her.
Yesterday I realized that today I am alone,
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
How terrifying.

How could you be so cruel to somebody so tender?
You who lord over the world,
Who sprinkle it with cities like constellations and rip the tide from pale shores to dash it upon sheer cliffs a moment after.
You who cry the rain, and lift the sun in your palm to daybreak.
You whose sighs push the clouds and whose anger splits the earth.
You who let your sons demolish one another and run the streets with blood like rivers in the name of all that you are.
YOU, how could you?
How could you break her like a twig, leave her gasping like a minnow tossed ashore, let her be drowned like a moth who has but kissed the pond's mirrored face?
How could you let the wall go up, brick by solid brick, and block the sun to starve her of her light?
How could you watch it happen and do nothing?
Ruler, Lord, Father and Tyrant, I shame you!
Why didn't you protect her? How could you fail to be what we wish you were?
You turned away like she was only dust on the breeze, let her scatter so that she may never find all the little pieces of herself.
What! Did no one pray for her, O Merciful God?
Well I will.
In hatred, of you.
How could you dismantle another life, even as you pull the moon across the sky, unfurl its light like petals?
How could you let her think she deserved it all?
You beast, you failure.
You atrocity.
I am ashamed of you.
Amen.

“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.

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.

Today it is raining
And the sky is reaching its fingers down
To comfort me.
We are the same
We neither of us
Know how to cry just right.
Sometimes I know the razorblade torrents of water
Are meant to be caresses.
The wind whips rain into my face
From a sympathetic sky
Reaching out
Contact,
Contact!-
It is lonely, never truly touched
And knows not how to be,
And its reaching hands are too rough, too eager
And then sometimes it ***** in its breath
As if it's realized it's gone much too far,
But we are the same.
We are the same and I understand why one moment I am drenched
And the next I only feel a mist.
We neither of us
Have control.
We are only trying
Our best.
It often rains on days when I am sad.
I wish it was acceptable to be a storm,
To throw yourself at the ground with all your abandon,
To wail
To crash lightning and split trees down their centers.
I wish it was okay to be so chaotic.
But never once has anybody seen my storm
And not been angered by its force.
So when I am sad I love to walk in the rain
Because we understand each other-
Everybody hates rainy days.
They are beautiful...
From inside.
They are necessary...
But endured.
Because they don't know when to quit.
They don't know
How-
Reeling out of control,
Sometimes your hair gets wrecked,
Sometimes
Your roof leaks.
Sometimes,
You just can't get the damp to stop clinging to your clothes
Like a needy child.
People hate rainy days.
I don't hate rainy days.
We understand each other.
I admire them.
They have no permission, either
To be so volatile,
So
Passionate.
But they do not hang on.
They let go.
Because it is all they know how
To do.
It is all I know how
To do either
But I am here on the ground,
Here in these bones that can't burst lightning
Or wail like the wind
Here in this flesh that, unlike the storm, needs to be loved.
So all I do is let the rain wash my face,
In solidarity
Because
We neither of us
Know how to cry just right.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

At five am this morning
I closed my door, quiet and slow, and
Crept out into the blackness.
It was silent.
Dead silent.
The stoplights were throwing velvety pools of light on the street
And I was drawn to the center of it
I placed my strides between the two yellow lines
And I started walking.
I just went.
I can't say whether five minutes passed, or ten, or twenty,
But eventually I left the road and doubled back
To the little bridge where you first kissed me.
And I sat there in the dark
With my legs dangling over a galaxy of reflected stars
Meteors with tails of mirrored streetlight,
Gold and shimmering,
A shadow cut-out of a person set in a silhouette of black water against a splash of light.
I lay my cheek on the cold metal of the rail,
And let it all seep into me-
The night, the cold, the glow of the stars.
My fingers brushed a little husk at the base of it
And I recognized the flower I'd placed there
Last time I'd walked across that bridge.
I'd been late. Late by a lot. Hurrying.
Rushing.
And I thought, Mikaila you are stupid for stopping to pick this flower.
But I did it anyway.
I always do it.
Every single time I walk over that bridge,
No matter who with,
I pick a flower
And set it at the base of that railing
In the spot where you kissed me.
I never give any explanation.
I just put one there, every time.
The tiny delicate thing crumbled at my touch
And the dust was taken by the wind across the shining water.
There I stayed for a long, long time,
And eventually I lay back and looked up at the stars.
There is a very bright one out this month,
A planet, somebody told me.
It was directly above me, glowing with cold, clear light,
And I told it
That I love you
And just then one of the tiny stars right by it
Dove across the universe
And landed in the lake at my feet.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

I feel as though I'm always under someone's thumb
These days.
I suppose it's not that I ever didn't,
Just that I always thought it would go away
Someday.
You know?
But everywhere I go
There always seems to be a man waiting
To tell me how best to exist
To explain to me
Something I already know
To give me- in the well meaning sort of way that makes my teeth itch-
Advice
On how best to conduct my life.

I'm sure you know the feeling.
I'm sure you've felt it too
And done what I always find myself doing--

Taking criticism you wonder if you'd get
If you weren't a woman.

Nodding through patronizing explanations
Of things you learned years ago.

Smiling meekly at detailed (and unsolicited) evaluations of your character,
Of all the minute things you do and don't do
And how you should do them or not do them
Differently.

"Oh really? Thank you, I'll be sure to do better next time."
I'll be sure to
Be
Better next time.

You say it out of instinct. Out of weariness.
Because you don't really fancy a fight, do you?
Not with someone so much
Bigger and stronger than you
In every classroom
In every workplace
In every system
In life.

If a man were to take a swing at me
Literally
I'm sure I'd be more apt to swing back
And better prepared
Than if he swung with the weight of his privilege
A mean
Right hook.
It's why they so seldom (relative to the alternative, at least)
Swing in the physical world:
Usually the blow lands just fine
As a criticism
Or a joke
Or even a look-
An assertion of
Dominance.
A reminder
Of who is really
In charge here.

And you find yourself
-I find myself-
Acquiescing
Oh I'm so sorry I'm not what you wished I was,
I'll
Change
So that you can be more comfortable.
Oh yes
Right away

Sir.

Everything you don't know
Is a weapon they've got to use against you.

Everything you say and do,
Ammunition.

Places you linger too long
And places you vacate too quickly,

They are marks against your name

Proof that you could always be more
Like them

Be better
Like them

(But not too much "better", or you're
Bossy
Rude
Abrasive.
Just "better" enough to assure them that
They're still the standard.)

But the thing is,
All this surrender,
It builds up.
You don't dissolve when you swallow yourself like a pill for them
Paint a sugary smile on your face
For them
And make sure they know you just aren't smart enough
Just aren't tough enough
To live without their guidance.
When you lie to survive
Those moments STAY.
They stick in your throat as you walk away.
They come back to you
Acidic and harsh
As you try to fall asleep.

That feeling
The feeling of acquiescence
It festers inside you
And it
NEVER really stops
Does it?

I don't know...
I just thought it would stop.
I thought
It would stop
After middle school.
And I thought
It would stop
After high school.
And I thought
It would stop
After college.

And it hasn't.

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.

"Please listen to me, don't go to art school. You'll be depressed when you can't get a job.

Please listen to me, don't live in a city. You'll be depressed when it's expensive.

Please listen to me, don't get tattoos. It'll ruin your job prospects, and they never come off, you know.

Please listen to me, don't date that girl. She'll break your heart and then you'll be more depressed than you are now, and I'd rather not deal with you being even more depressed, it's so unsettling.

Please listen to me, why don't you live at home for a while? You could save up and then start your life in a few years.

Please listen to me, I don't want you to have a Hard Life(™).

Please listen to me... you have to get out of bed...

Please listen to me, you look like a plant that's been kept in the dark. I'm scared.

Please listen to me,
I know what's best for you.

...Please say something.
Hello?"

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

I wandered late, but I was not alone:
The Night walked with me
Like a black hound
With eyes of rainwater-starlight,
And breath in misty plumes.

The church loomed, hulking, in the dark,
For in my fragility I sought some solace there-
To be alone in a place where faith rang like music,
Perhaps the echoes of believers would seep into me
And slow my pulse
And lend me a scrap of comfort that I didn't own...
There is something sacred about a silent place
In which hundreds of people have sat and allowed themselves
To feel,
And I believe in that, if not in God.

Halfway to tears, I tried the door
But it was locked.
And the belated certainty that it always had been
Settled over me like a lead blanket,
And I sat, shivering, on the steps.
And my companion-
Now a hot, solid form of shifting bones and sinew-
Whined his sympathies,
Curled around me
And laid his massive head
Upon my knee.

And forgive me for staring but I've never seen/eyes like yours, take my breath, and I guess what I mean is/I'd follow you down into hell and back home if you'd let me.
If you'd let me I'd give you the rain, and that moment at night when the sun has just set, and the stars/and I'd give you my heart and the air in my lungs and I'd walk out to meet you/it's never too far if I hear your voice at the end.
If you'd let me.
If you'd let me I'd draw you a city and when it was done it would rise off the page, and surround you/and I'd bring you flowers at 4 in the morning/because I can't sleep when I know you're upset...
And I know that I'm young/and I know that you're busy/I know that I'm not what you planned and it doesn't make sense/but the problem is when I'm around you my heart is a tympany drum and my mind is a mess/and the only thing in this whole world that I want is to see/you/smile.
So if you'd let me I'd like to be someone who stays up till 5:15 in the blue morning and watches the sunrise with you from a rooftop/and looks at you like you're a dream.
And I love when you stutter and trip like a brook on your words, little pebbles that tumble out jumbled/I love how you laugh and the way the world fades when you look in my eyes and take/my breath/away.
I'd like to be someone whose voice makes you smile, whose bad jokes cheer you up on your cloudiest days/whose eyes in the dark tell you "You're the whole world, and there's nothing so wonderful as your next phrase."
I love that you hug me for longer than I have expected whenever you leave me behind/and I love that sad moment when I linger watching you go cause I can't walk away when I know you're still there...
And I love all your scars and the way you've endured and I want to be all that you're missing.
And if you'd let me I'd love you through all of your faults and your petty mistakes and your failings/and I'd be the steadying arms every bad day and the voice that cuts through your self doubt to say you are amazing/and I'd be a love of your life because I'd be so sure that you'd always be just what I wanted/and I'd bring you flowers at 4 in the morning/because I can't sleep when I love you so much...
If you'll let me I'll be your adoring companion/here, quiet and sure that you're brighter than all of the stars/if you let me I'll love you with all of the parts of me I have held back and I'll give you the world/and the only thing in this whole life that I'll want is to see/you/smile...
If you'll let me.

It is not your fault, what happened to me.
But this,
This,
You knowing what IS happening to me,
And knowing you can stop it with almost no effort,
And doing nothing, this...
Is.
And I forgive you.
I give myself no other choice, whenever you hurt me.
The only way is to forgive you, to find a way to love you even if you're
Silent,
Or venomous,
Or cowardly.
I never know if you are. I do not let myself find out.
I do not know your flaws,
Because I tell myself that to assume them would be the death of me, by your hand.
So I unfocus my eyes and look at you only through what you show me.
Perhaps you are a coward, afraid of what I am and what we've seen of one another. I wouldn't know it if you were.
Or perhaps you are angry that somebody pulls emotion from you.
Or perhaps you are just cruel.
Or perhaps you are none of this,
And I could not imagine what you are,
And whatever that is
Is right,
And whatever I am
Is wrong.
That is the end I come to.
That is the conclusion I reach, each time, to save you from me.
To save me from hating you, and to save you from losing me, I make you
Right.
I do not know if you have ever been right.
I refuse to know.
It doesn't matter.
You want to be. No... no I don't even think it's that.
I think you want me to be wrong.
Yes, that is it, you want me to be wrong, because I have reached some part of you that you don't enjoy.
You want it desperately, to pretend nothing bad happens, to pretend that the people in your life are
Easy and
Simple,
Unbreakable,
Unbroken,
Uncomplicated.
You want laughter to be the only thing,
But underneath we both know you are too smart not to see that without pain
Joy
Means nothing.
But you want your way.
You want me wrong, and I must want what you want
If you are to keep me.
And so I want to be wrong.
Want to apologize.
I want you to get your venom out at me, so that I may die of it and satisfy you, and have you back again.
Love me, hate me, but get it done.
**** me with one or the other so that I can rise again and love you.
So that I can be your friend and give you what I can.
It is not your fault, how I suffered before.
You knew nothing of it.
You couldn't have known.
You couldn't have fixed it.
But now you do know.
You have known for a long time, what happens to me when you hate me.
How it poisons me.
You have seen.
And so any punishment you hand me now is given without the shield of ignorance,
With full knowledge and intent.
You have watched me dying.
You have tried to save me,
Or to **** me,
And found that the moment is perpetual-
You can do neither.
You have seen the pain, and chosen to extend it, and
I
Forgive
You,
Whatever your reason.
It doesn't matter. It can't matter.
There is only the forgiveness.
You are a religion to me, because the only way I can stand to love you is to worship you.
If I were to see you as a human being, I would be unable to imagine such
Heartlessness and such
Tenderness
Wrapped up in one soul, given to the same person on the whim of the day.
If you were not a god, you would have to be two people:
One to ****** me and one to mourn me.
One to wound me and one to stitch me up.
One to hate me and one to love me.
You have seen. You know.
You know who I am, in full, even if you do not understand it,
And you have claimed you want to help me.
And I have asked you for what I need,
And you have given it inconsistently.
And I have loved you and hated you,
And you have loved me and hated me.
And I have forgiven you.
But you have never forgiven yourself.
And that is the only thing
I cannot do for you.

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.

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.

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.

You need to go.
And I don't know how to do it.
I don't want to forget you, to cut you off. I don't want to shatter my love for you.
There has to be another way.
But... you need to go.
I can't keep waking up sore every morning. Raw.
I can't keep talking myself out of tears.
I can't keep wondering why the hell you matter to me, and abusing myself for caring about you.
But I don't know how to do it. It's not in me to extinguish a love.
I have sacrificed every part of myself at least once to avoid it.
It has been the single thing I am unwilling to do.
The one unwavering line in the sand.
And I know where this leads- this trying to erase it.
I know because I've tried,
In pain,
In desperation, to destroy a love before. And I couldn't do it.
I threw more and more at it, unleashed every weapon I had.
And by the end...
I had caught the rest of me in the crossfire, and the only thing that remained untouched was that love.
You need to go.
But that will happen again if I try to uproot you from my soul.
It is a humbling lot. A prideless realization. That I must wait.
That I must serve the part of me that holds me captive, the only part of me I know as indestructible,
The part that reigns because nothing can dethrone it.
I must bow to it, because I like what else I am.
I know that even if I tried with every ounce of courage and hatred I have built up over my years to demolish my love for you, the dust would clear,
And it would be the only thing about me left.
And I don't want it to be.
I don't respect it enough to let it be my defining factor.
And so I sit and stew and wait, for it to loosen its stranglehold, or for you to come back.
It is a prideless thing. And I am a proud person.
And it chafes every single day.
And I swallow it, and go on.

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'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'm starting to understand that I have learned to say
"I'm sorry" when people are cruel to me, and
"Thank you" when they undervalue me.
Don't let your life teach you that.
Eventually you blacken your lungs with it.
Eventually you're jonesing for it when you should be indignant or angry or proud.
Don't learn to survive.
Learn to live.
Cause it's a lot harder to do when you have to start in the middle.
The people who hear the most apologies from me are the ones who are hurting me.
The people who get the most of my gratitude are often the people who give me the least.
It's backward. It's dangerous.
It's what happens when you learn all alone.
You learn the wrong way to get to the right goal.
And eventually it starts to ******* you, and it dawns on you that you need to change, to recover, to quit, and you just don't know how.
Don't let your life teach you to be sorry.
To be grateful when you're underestimated and undervalued.
It will try. People will try.
The world pushes.
I wish someone had ever told me that it's okay not to be contrite,
That I should demand what I deserve,
That when I am cast aside or ignored, it isn't something I could have prevented if I'd simply been
Better, happier,
Easier,
More humble.
Because that thought right there ruins people.
Love yourself.
Do it quick, before someone else gets it.
Learn to thank yourself, to forgive yourself, before you turn around one day and discover
That someone else's eyes hold your galaxy.
Because love is wonderful, but...
I wish I'd had time to learn not to be afraid,
To learn to fight back,
To learn that being quiet is highly overrated,
Before I learned that somebody's smile could fill every empty part of my heart I'd ever cried over.
If you are still young inside, this is your chance.
Love yourself. Don't apologize. Don't lower your eyes. Don't restrain yourself.
Do not let this world teach you to be owned.

Love,
Someone who learned too well.