To you, my heart sleeve, You from whom I pull my feelings like fossils to examine. You my dictionary, my reference book, who helps define and label each one with patience and understanding.

You who lets me write her poetry, who lets me drip her love into these pages just so I may find a better way to know it. You who lets me turn you into poetry like we are in love even though we are not in love. That sounds romantic but maybe its not, maybe it doesn't have to be.

Once I went to a slam poetry night and a man told me that if you write more than one poem about a person you are in love with some parts of them. I have entire forests that bleed and weep your name because I write you so often. Maybe we are some kind of in love but I do not know with what parts or if its even worth saying aloud.

You my rock, the solid foundation on which I would build a home if given half a chance. Permanence of a kind I have never tasted before you.

To you, and you know who you are. My compass, the lighthouse guiding me to shore. I am missing you, as I have been missing you for every moment since we last parted, for every fraction of a second between now and the moment my skin stopped hugging yours.

To you, the owner of a folder in my phone, full of all the pictures and quotes I am saving for when you are ready to come back to me, for when your heart stops aching just enough to let me back in.

To you, the only person who will ever see the original version of this poem where I stitched every word together with your name, even though you may never see this poem because I do not know if I am ready for this yet.

Love, wherever you are, whoever you may be. Whether you are a face I know well or a stranger I have yet to meet, know that I have been waiting for you. When you find me, notice the little place in your soul where my love is aglow, already a small ember that has always lingered there, please do not be afraid to sit by its warmth.

Love, I know, I know I am a tad crazy, a little naive, but I promise if you tend to this ember it will keep you warm for longer than any flame could. I don't love much, I keep my heart a lock box with only just enough room for you but I promise that everything I am capable of will be yours as long as you are willing to ask for it.

Love, always ask. Always question. Never think that silent treatment is an acceptable method of dealing with problems. I am well acquainted with the silence of repression and I know that She solves nothing. Let us communicate so that there is never doubt, so we may never go to bed with anger and sadness.

Love, my days are not always happy, and even the good ones are often tinged by sadness but believe me when I say I want nothing but happiness in your life. I will always do whatever it takes to bring some light into the days when it rains the hardest for you, even when I cannot fathom my own sunshine.

Love, if you find yourself weary, wearing the weight of this world like a shroud you aren't strong enough to shoulder, invite me in. Let me bear the weight with you. Being by your side in any circumstance is easy for me, like I was meant to walk with you all my life. I will never turn you away when you ask for help.

Love, if you can't stand it, can no longer bear the burden of loving me with all of my crazy, with all of the darkness I have kept, don't be afraid to ask where the door is. I don't know much but I do know that if you want to leave I will not stop you. Just be sure to kiss me before you go so I can press my heart into your hands to be sure you have my love along with you.

Love, please try your best not to leave. I have watched too many people walk out of my life and I hope you stay, I always hope you'll stay.

I have starved past the point of hunger,
and continued til hunger came back only to leave again.
I have tried to slit my wrists until my sanguine blood wine poured like tears, like fountain, like waterfall.
All I have ever wanted is to make myself smaller, to shrink away from these haunted memories, from my tainted past.
Sometimes wishes come true.

I am dying.
I don't say that lightly,
this isn't a hearty joke to laugh at later.
I am dying and doing nothing to stop my personal decay.
They all pretend to worry,
ask if I'm losing weight,
Ask why I am so tired all the time but I never respond with any truth.
I've lost near twenty pounds in less than a month while still eating with consistency,
Yesterday I threw up nothing and saw blood.
My skin is so weak it is no longer a barrier between inside and out,
More like a ribbon at the end of a race,
one last thing to run through before the finish.

I am afraid that there is so much I will never get to reconcile with,
like the fact that I threw away someone I loved for the high,
The fact I may never really get to say goodbye.
I don't know what is the sickness to fear,
The one who won't let me breathe,
or the one who keeps love from me.

She's aching again, you feel it in the way your heart tugs, in the way you cannot breathe because it hurts, hurts, hurts. You're vomiting nothing into the toilet, haven't been able to keep anything down for days now. Deep down you know its because you are scared that she too will leap from the pit and wash down the drain. The kind of leaving no one comes back from.
So you're screaming now, hoping that promises of 'always' and 'you will never do this alone' hit home. Yet you have never known an always, just a lot of almosts and you are terrible at letting people in your world because you believe your destiny reads loneliness. But for her you'd be anything, anything at all to know she is here and breathing even if that means becoming something of permanence rather than the leaf in the wind you wrote yourself to be.
So you sit making promises of forever and always for the first time in your life because even though you always have one foot over the edge you'll do anything to get her to take a step back, because you love and she aches, because you love and can't help but feel all her pain.

Yesterday I seriously considered taking my own life. Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about how this was an exit sign, a real way out. Now I realize that it is no more than a doorway into another room, you still reside in the building but cannot see through the wall to the ones you love; those who love you.

You see suicide keeps you close enough to touch. Years will pass without healing because no words make your absence coherent, there is no easy disease word to swallow like cancer or crohns or complications. When you die by suicide you are immortalized by sadness, already depressed friends who will still mention you to their therapist in passing thirty years from now, with sadness, with cracking levee voice. Your pain lives in them now.

When my hands became more knife than weeping pen I called my bestfriend, asked 'why, why do you love me? How, how can you love me?' With laughter in her voice and heart in her words she explained and explained again,
"You are loved, you are cherished, you are worth loving. I won't give up on you. I love you."
In this she shared my pain with the first few men who did not make me fear my body, who gave an out pouring of love I still cannot comprehend. Even a stranger who still sees me faceless except for a few kind words, told me I was destined for more than this, more than a bloodied ending.
I'm holding all of this love in a lock box beneath my heart, the kind of stash I don't really need to hide or fear seeing the bottom.of.

Yesterday I was seriously considering final words. Today I am working on what I will say some future day to the friends who fought distance and depression to give me a reason to promise to stay.

Watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Trying to remember what the peace of actual sleep felt like. Counting the seconds between each inhale sounds like small prayer, a scream of please please please don't leave. She's lost weight again and you're doing your best to not panic about it, hoping that by not acknowledging the way death hangs around her shoulders he will spare her, spare you the pain of loss.

Its been two weeks since your ex promised to call you, and you're pretending that all the hope you had doesn't lay at the feet of a silent phone line. There is so much you want to tell her, things you can barely choke out to yourself, like the fact that you are still in love with her, that you're positive if it were anyone, she was the one. The only one who ever made your heart flutter like that, the only person who would understand how terrified you are of being permanently alone.

For now you lay on the cold floor, trying not to let two years of the one who got away strangle you, sipping warm wine and thinking that this was how it smelled the first and last time you trusted someone to touch your bare skin without flinching. You're watching this body on your bed taking shallow breaths, crying because you know that soon enough you will be alone again and she's never coming back.

I just returned to the place I call home and I'm already planning on leaving again.

And I know you're thinking you were only away a few days, a few more can't hurt but you see this is just what I do, this is that vice I cannot seem to kick no matter how many times I promise I'm quitting. Even the alcohol and cigarettes that stole the best years of my life don't compete with this leave-leave-leaving.

For some one who needs stability, who writes poetry in repetitions of three because her heart stutters compulsions, like embolism, like maybe it could **** me, like I don't wanna die, I have a funny obsession with making my life unstable. Always turning my world on its head, finding solace in strange places surrounded by different faces.
It never makes me happy, whether moving or stagnant I feel like I'm missing missing missing a part of me and I have no idea how to find it. It is the ghost that haunts me.

So I'm grabbing the bag I never bother to unpack, add to it my melancholy and the frightening 'what if' of my failing health, trying to not feel like a liar for promising I'd go see someone about it, trying not to feel failure in the fact that I don't know if I can stay long enough to see someone about it, trying not to feel like this is my way of kissing this life goodbye. Hopefully this isn't how I leave you.