teach me youth,

the way it fumbles down spiral staircases
and flutters in late summer wind,
how it forgets the existence of time
as if preserved in fear
like fireflies pounding tirelessly against the walls of our trembling hands on August evenings

for I have forgotten it,
the look--
eyes overcast and words crossing their arms
because they have grown too fearful
of making a mess, the shy first kisses of  tangled hair and secrecy.

teach me how to dance
with aimless feet, stumbling
as if light can only pass through
the opacity of hardened hearts
with the soft brush of innocence
that somehow neglected to paint you brand new.

After comfort settles in, you wonder if the giddy anticipation has already packed its suitcase and whether it has already considered embarking on the next flight home. Today, your hair is pulled back in a soft tousled ponytail and the two hours you spent getting ready for your first real date has since waned into a rushed ten minutes, bobby pins resting at the corner of your lips. No longer do you wait on the staircase, eyes cast through the dusty window at the curve of your street for his car. Instead, you hear the electricity of his footsteps come humming up your front step, reverberating memorized and familiar, a sound that still makes the edges of your heart rise upwards like something you mumble in your sleep. It is today you decide that this is normal. His socks on the floor, his shoes kicked off and remaining tied tightly at your front doormat. He smiles and it looks exactly like last September, like uncomfortable summer, melting like birthday candles and falling in love with a stranger all over again.
You know him now, his hands, little—but firm. Those eyes shining in the humid July, and you swear that if someone asked you to choose their color from a palette, you could find it in a heartbeat, with a nonchalant point of a finger. Yet there will always be something about him, something new and as fresh as a ripe apple falling from the highest branch, bright burning red that you catch with your bare hands before it has the chance to hit the ground.
And your love, though you have learned it by heart, is the apple, scarlet and dewy, that you keep your eyes gazing up at even after you have memorized the physics of its fall. His arms are a fire you have warmed yourself by long enough to feel safe forever. But you are both ruthless and young, burning in dangerous shades of potential eternities.

You have fallen, but you are still falling. Love has a knack for catching the hopeless.

Those days,
I remember them clearly-- the ones decorated in violence.
There was no one left for me to fight
but the distorted figure glaring back
in the ***** mirror,
the reflected face that suffocated my gaze,
exhaling new nightmares like shattered glass fragments of insecurity
dropped from every creaky fire escape
overlooking the collarbone roads
of my own demolished city.
Those days,
my heart hurt more than it desired to beat.
But the pretty words flowed out of my fingertips like honey,
poetry never hiding at the back of my throat
like something that was afraid of commitment.
It filled all of the empty spaces,
cursive loops imprinted upon the edges of time,
the gaps between my own hands rubbing together in the winter,
black ink serenading pale paper.
Never lacking, never losing.
But the war has since ended.
The battlefield no longer exists in the trenches of my mind,
monuments proclaiming love rather than defeat.
I now rise to the bittersweet taste of victory,
morning bells chiming in my ears
as if this is my first time hearing music. Days have blurred into warm colors and melodies of laughter, of faith, of newfound innocence.
I have learned that it is easiest to swallow life by adding a teaspoon of sugar.
It is easiest to live without the weight of failed attempts.

I miss them so.
The words rarely visit.
Rarely call.
They are quieter now, poetry confined to corners I cannot see.
They were only ever around to witness the gore, the blood, the fickle sweat.
And once they had witnessed the scars fade into pink,
they did too-- just like all of the hurt that had risen up out of my tender bones
and into the stars.

I miss the days when I would find poetry resting peacefully on the kitchen counter, hiding skillfully between the cracks of the tile bathroom floor. Back then, it shuttled out from the tips of my fingers like golden lightning that kept my heart pulsing, my eyelids propped open wide with all of the secrets I had been struck with.  

There were nights I found it in the soft flutter of his eyelashes against my cheek, the glowing warmth of his hand that held mine like something he would never grow tired of carrying, even though that was where I kept all of the words that had been stolen from my lips since the first moment I knew that I loved him.

But back then, they were everywhere-- the words-- nestling in high nests perched upon branches I was always tall enough to reach, settling in the pockets of worn denim overalls and the creases of watercolor smiles I had secretly painted on strangers with no names to match the dim light of their faces.

There was a time. There is a time.

Now, I sit at my desk with trembling hands and words stuck jumbled and uncharted in the aftermath of the past. And poetry no longer spills from the cracks of the baby pink teapot, no longer falls with every tear that still remembers how to emulate the rain.

But it is here when I am with him, his arms becoming the paper I have spilled my soul onto back before I memorized the melody of his heartbeat. In the sound of our voices filling all of the vacant spaces that used to haunt my bones, in the hushed music that plays every time my name drips like honey from the edges of his laughter.

There is a time. It is now. Poetry was once written, now it is living.

You have since forgotten the stale aroma of old books, how they once stretched your afternoons into nights that ended in the final flutters of heavy eyelids and young hearts beating with flustered adrenaline.
An eternity has separated your fingertips from the edges of creased paper memories that have since faded into faint flickers of yesterdays, wilted and tarnished like the handles of childhood bicycles left out in the rain.

The thrill of disappearing into the spines of stories where your name could be whisked away into the summer wind and forgotten, every mistake ever committed melting within the spaces of all of the words you were once too afraid to write yourself.

Chasing thrills was only ever appropriate for the innocent.

And you remember being young—living without thinking twice about the hands of the clock and their lonely waltz, never worrying about crossing off monotonous boxes on the calendar and or where tomorrow would begin. Instead, you’d just wake, wiping away the hazy violet sleep from your eyes, your little fingers sounding out the words existing upon unfamiliar pages you were still too small to understand.

But now you do. You are full of understanding. The way time slips through bigger hands that have grown strong and calloused with the weight of your own troubles, how you have learned that trying to catch it after the fall is equivalent to waiting for yesterdays to come knocking at your front porch. The way days never return home, never send you letters, never call first.

Comfort sleeps in the knowledge of temporary. Time is fleeting. Perhaps love is too, but you are still too soft to know this yet. Still too eager to be left out in the rain.

And when you finally curl up with a stack of paperback nostalgia, you are greeted with neglected lives and heroes that exist far beyond the ones you have broken yourself to be saved by.

*You  have been busy chasing thrills this entire time.
You have only ever been innocent.

Write it all down. The way you feel when you wake up on a rainy Saturday morning, the howling thunder of a summer storm, how your heart races like hurricane winds at the simple thought of tomorrow. Write about your best friend's laugh at three in the morning and how blissful it is to have found a hand that squeezes yours back. Write when you feel as if your soul is perched at the very top of a mountain, and when it sinks to the deepest part of your mind's treacherous oceans. Write when your heart is dancing like a ballerina spinning in a white tutu. Write when it is still. Quiet. Lost. Write when you've fallen in love, when you've lost at a cruel game, when you fall asleep wanting to erase every memory you've ever experienced, like the songs you cried to when you were thirteen and swore you were falling apart. Write it all down, the bright colors that melt into fond afternoons, the bittersweet tastes, the textures that scar, the aches and pains. Write when words can no longer express what exists inside of you. Do it anyway. That is what love is.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not always a happy person. I am not made of summer sunshine and daffodils and constantly feeling limitless. I am not a cartoon character on the screen of a static television that can only ever showcase one emotion, laughing away humble hours and only ever blushing out of joy. There are days when my skin is the last place I want to live in, my heartbeat just like an overplayed song on the radio. There are days that I burn, when staying buried under my sheets feels infinitely more worth it than getting out at all. Days when I let my fear of failure grab me by the throat with no intention of letting go, ones I wish would end before they even have the chance to begin.
I am human. Real. I make mistakes that stretch like wildfire and burn everything comfortable to me. I am a victim of comparison, of self-inflicted hurt, of seemingly endless defeat. There were eras where I measured my importance on the size of my waist, the amount of attention received from others, by false love. I once thought that I could find acceptance in what others had to say about my existence, that I would only find joy in being fearless.
Math scares me. Finding spiders in my sink terrifies me. Public speaking tosses my stomach like ***** laundry. My fear of abandonment holds me hostage, prevents me from tasting vulnerability. I am even afraid of myself on the days it is hard to keep inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. I am very much afraid. I am alive because of it.
Fear is captivating, not always negatively. It allows us to understand what really matters based on a collection of what we are afraid of losing.
And yes, the same life I was eager to lose back a few forevers ago has morphed into one I never want to lose. I love this. I am loved, and I am holding on tight to the carousel of reality. I will hold my breath even if I fear running out of air, because I'd rather be breathless and experienced than falsely believe that there are no more horizons left to reach.