I.
It is so simple.
Tuesday atmosphere bleeding
autumn rain down windowpanes,
the descent of fragile hopes
and hands intertwined a little
too tight for wondering.


II.
We are here; hazy within
the iridescent walls of my childhood home.
We slow dance to the fading refrigerator light,
our laughter reverberating down the stairs
I fell down when I was in kindergarten
and afraid of boys with loud voices.


III.
It is more complicated than they think.
We scour home decor magazines,
pointing at flattened apartment windows
overlooking the bustle of city chaos.
A young couple walks across the page
and into a dusk-painted room,
faces exuberant in the sunlight
of their newborn lives.
One day, we will be just like them, you tell me.
I almost forget that I have yet to turn
seventeen.


IV.
In my head, there is nothing wrong
with designing the future,
sketching myself into false realities
where I feel safe falling asleep
in someone else’s arms.
I have written myself within the spaces
of unpromised decades,
and I paint your hands, the ridges--
the crevices in which I have placed
an abundance of gemstone promises
that do not shatter in the light of something real.



V.
We are young
but I love you.
To the rest of the world, we are teenagers
clutching each other’s spines in grass fields
when we cannot even comprehend
what we are praying for.
Hold me.
I love you.
I cannot promise this enough.

I am running out of pretty words
to let them know that
my darkness
is not fictional.
It is hidden instead
under crimson lipstick dripping down
blood red sins on the white lace dress
I wore on my First Communion.
My mother does not understand
how my mind, of sixteen years,
has run out of purity—
casualties of fading light
and trembling hands that have forgotten
the dimpled smile on God’s glorious face
the day I was born.
I too, have forgotten that day,
instead dreaming of mornings spent
on my bedroom floor heaven
of rapidly-inflating lungs
and eyes that have seen the reflection of affliction
far too many times to be considered holy.
For I am the sacrificial lamb
slaughtered to the mumbled hypocrisy of praise,
blinded by the guilt
of every mortal sin collecting like bodies in silence;
the sound of shattered souls buried by seraphims.

How much grace can one mortal swallow?

I beg you.
Have mercy on me.

You are not supposed to rip pages
out of books bound by human spines
or all of the pages will fall out
and disperse across the ground
like autumn leaves exhausted of trying.

I learned this the hard way.

If there is a cure or concoction
to heal a brilliant mind

I crave it,

because finding medicine to express
my mutilated madness
is like dying without understanding
the allegory of mercy.

He wants to understand what hides
under soft satin skin and apathy.
I see it in the way the crumpled lines on his forehead
form question marks when I cry
because there was never a reason
nor answer
as to why my heart always seemed
to perpetuate the memory
of autumn.

No, he will never know, curious as he is,
because skin is miles
and miles
and miles deep
plummeting down to a hollow core
of sickness
of sorrow
of solitude
that could dissolve all of his worries
but never my own.

The first time you mentioned forever,
I attempted to measure it.

Just how far can heartstrings stretch
when tugged by the blur of passing seasons,
extended arms, and miles of uncharted tomorrows?

No matter how many times I have watched
hands embrace the seconds of fleeting time
I still wonder if a moment exists                                                                                              
when they will finally tire of spinning, trying to find
salvation in the rotation of infinity

if it even exists.

Forever
making pit stops at sixteen at seventeen
in yesterdays expired and the blood red rush
of exhausted mistake.
Forever
smoke seeping through door cracks,
fires of promise, of passion, of fading
Forever
we will love
Forever
until our names run dry of meaning.

Just how many heartbeats does it take
to shelter an angel,
how many words exchanged does it take
to ****** the demons that wish to place
years and age and affliction
between the two who have painted
a thousand forevers between hands
held so tightly that minds forget how to change?

I am still trying to measure even now,
as we glide toward moments whose horizons
we will always be searching for.

Sometimes victory is the first step. The turn of a doorknob. The cry for help. Victory is finally getting up to eat dinner after crying silently on your bedroom floor when the weight of the world collects like dictionaries upon your shoulders. It is eating that bowl of ice cream anyway, even when the same voices that have haunted you for years keep attempting to shrink you into a skeleton shadow. It is dressing up in the morning when all you want to do is let scorching hot water carve paths down your spine, forgetting the sound of all the voices you have ever heard because it causes you to wonder just when yours disappeared. It is reading a poem in front of your class, hands and voice shaking like palm trees in hurricane wind. It is realizing that some people will pretend to understand the fire of your soul yet cower in your presence due to the terror of getting burned. It is realizing that you are not immune to this, susceptible to creating madness in the nights you keep searching for, but cannot find, any air left to breathe.
It is admitting you are weak. It is choosing to believe the I-love-yous even when they hang above your head like chandelier glass. It is falling asleep shattered yet committed to wake up anyway. Victory is hidden in the idea that tomorrow, as lonely as today has painted it,


exists.

The first steps you take as you enter the immaculate hallways of the first cathedral in Rome are the last ones taken out of fear.

Fear, you had always been full of it, of potential abandonment and quivering voices.

But here, the arches have beckoned years upon years of marveling, of eyes cast upward at staggering golden ceilings, light reflecting through the brilliance of violet stained glass.

This is the moment in which you realize that bravery exists in the aftermath. Just hours ago, you had boarded the suffocating plane all by yourself, red sneakers and matching suitcase, departing the same home that kept you calm for so long. With shaking hands and a hammering heart, you are buzzing with static electricity you were too afraid to understand before this moment.

Peeking out of the claustrophobic airplane window, you realize just how small you are, how microscopic everything seems just as soon as it has been defeated. And though your worries have taken shelter as a lump in your throat, they soon dissolve like sugar cubes in hot tea.

There is nothing left but tranquility.

Cascading blankets of translucent white hang daintily through the glass, blinding the plummeting ground from existence. This is the first time you have ever let yourself taste freedom.

And then, while your neck cranes down at the indigo expanse below you, you realize that the same blue is no longer taking shelter inside of your bones. Blue no longer runs through the paths of veins in your hands or in the moments in class you wished you would have said something but never did. Blue no longer remembers your writing and how easy it was to fit solitude in between the letters.

Blue, instead, is all around you, oceans below your feet like a collection of everything you were too heavy to hold onto.

Somewhere, miles and hours behind you, your mother is cooking dinner. She will leave an extra bowl of Monday night soup at your place at the dinner table, an accidental broth you will never taste. Your father’s heavy eyelids have collapsed, television humming white noise, cat on his shoulder as the peach-colored dusk melts into the room.

Yet you were there,

suspended miles of infinities above the same ocean you fell in love with back when you were even smaller than before. Back when your big brown eyes followed paths in the heavens, the soft glide of the ones brave enough to shuttle toward new horizons, redefining the notion of reckless abandon.

And now, you are here.

You are one of them.

Captivated, enveloped in the shadows of the masterpieces that have aged over thousands of lives that will never meet yours. You are a pioneer of your first real experience, marble statues and pillars the sole witnesses of your rebirth.

They are haunting, breathtaking, faces painted gracefully upon crumbling walls in colors that once made souls tremble in the same skies you had dreamed of, and then dreamed in.

You are here, surrounded by memories of light. And for a couple of moments tied together by blind hope, you forget that darkness once knew you by name.

I remember everything— each space on the calendar crossed out in permanent marker but never forgotten.

I remember every before and after, every minute that has passed by my irises with the impatience of speeding cars on the interstate. I keep my hands permanently cupped so that memories cannot slip through the cracks in my fingers, tea spilling from my grandmother's cracked porcelain. Every heartbeat that has silently taken refuge under the rug, every breath I spent wondering what it would be like if I peeked out and saw the soles of the feet that have replaced the metronome of my steps.

I am building a life out of the sound of my own laughter echoing down walls painted by the artist of morning light. My heart is a kaleidoscope house with mirrors I peer into and find older versions of myself, silhouettes of smaller dreamers with eyes that could ignite the world with the gentle flutter of a blink.

I am dressed up as Tinkerbell for my first birthday, fairy green and sparkling. Pictures are taken, kisses on pink cheeks and soft feet. Growing up is not an option. Blink. I am 5 years old and missing my front teeth, crying lava on the bus ride to school as my mother’s familiar face shrinks through the frosted window. No matter how hard I squint, she is still just a dot on the sidewalk waiting for me to come home. Blink. I am eight years old and playing with Barbie dolls on my bedroom carpet, crayons scattered all over my bed and my imagination sprinting across the baby pink walls faster than I can keep up with it. Blink. Thirteen hurts a lot more than scraping knees on uneven sidewalks. My own tears begin to taste like the beginnings of a broken heart. Blink. Blink. Blink.

I am sixteen and in love. The kind that holds my breath hostage in its arms, the kind that knows my name like the lyric of a song memorized in past lives. My hopes remain suspended twenty thousand feet in the air, fearless and spontaneous. There are flowers growing wildly in the way that I love him, in the way I see myself waiting for a thousand years to have this forever. The taste of happiness has finally made its way into my morning coffee.

And as much as they wanted me to live in Neverland forever, I have finally found the door to where my heart lives. Every moment is a volume. Every day is a masterpiece hung intentionally on the wall for the world to see, for my own hungry eyes to catch a glimpse of now.

Blink. It is time.