Girls like me are taught to treat our bodies like metaphors, we are taught that we can only be desired if we are oceans and hillsides, if we are Septembers and sinkholes. They paint us, all sunset eyes and nicotine, hoping to color us in with their washed out words, so that maybe we can mean something. We are taught to fold into ourselves, to shrink our waists and our voices, that being small minded will compensate for the space that we take up. We are taught to apologize for the space that we take up. Girls like me have to be thankful to the stranger who comes and dares to want us, as if we’re only worth our weight in love poems, as if he’s doing me a favor with his wandering hands. Girls like me fill our heads with shipwreck and sorry’s, hoping that this time it’ll be different. That this time, for once, love might be blind. That this time, for once, we can be enough. Girls like me are afraid of being enough. Because maybe if I think of my body as anything more than a graveyard, your ghost hands will find somewhere new to rest.

Who were you?
You were once a girl with glasses, who hated dolls and any shade of pink on your clothes.
You were once a girl who hated that phrase, no matter how many times you were told.
You were once an individual scared of breaking out of your shell and showing the world your beautiful blue wings.
You were once a young 12-year-old boy; learning the meaning of love and how to apply it to yourself, without finding it in other things…
You were once a troubled 14-year-old who hated his naked reflection and drowned his sorrows in pill bottles and toxic love you knew was enough to ****.
You were once a friend with a heart made of sweets and chocolate; enough to give you cavities or make you ill.
But now, who are you?
When you look in the mirror, what do you see?
Do you see a beautiful blue butterfly, with wings spread wide?
Or do you see that troubled youth, ready to choke on some pills and die?
Do you picture a future? Any future for yourself 10 years down the road?
Or is your mind bombarded by the past and your perspective of the future blurred with the words echoed
In the back of your neck, stopping you from thinking clearly;
Stopping you from sleeping those nights you’re awake and looking at the ceiling?
When I see you, I don’t know who I see anymore.
I don’t know if I see the boy you used to be or a stranger with eyes drained of joy.
Are you just a copy of what you’ve dreaded to become, or are you a paperboy?
Are you a paperboy ready to hurt me with your paper cuts? Please be careful because I am oh so delicate.
You probably know this though; too afraid I’ll break so you don’t even keep in touch.
My apologies if I’m fragile. My apologies if I’m beaten and torn.
I’m just terrified of being left alone, or finding someone plagued with thorns.
I found comfort in a friend like you.
But now, who are you?

You are my forever. I have loved and been loved, but never in the way I have loved or been loved by you. You’re the one who silences the demons at three in the morning, the voice that guides me towards anxiety-free days, the fingertips I want against my skin when it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon and God is sending invisible missiles to the rest of the world. There have been many adrenaline-pumping love stories in the book of my life, an exhausting amount of cliché teenage heartbreak ballads, but you are my forever. You are my one in a million chance at happiness. You are who every one of my romance novels are about and the happiness I wish for on every shooting star. You’re the one my heart has been yearning for. You are my forever. My heart yearns to have your skin against mine, our love transmitting through simple kisses and thunderous heartbeats breaking the silence. Silence with you is never silent though; phone calls are never empty even when we’ve both falling into deep and careless dreams. I dream of you and me doing the simplest of things together: pancakes at 9am and cuddling at 10pm. I crave holding your hand as you’re driving on an empty highway, gazing at your complexion and messy hair while you’re gazing at the stars above, painting our first apartment together, but having to wash confetti colored splatters off each other at the end of the day, and staying up all night as vibrations of laughter fill our bedroom. My heart leaps at the thought of raising puppies together and seeing your beaming smile when you come home to your hairy, slobbery, wet-nosed children and thanking God every day for having you by my side, my miracle. I never knew what love was until I learned to love and be loved by you. We are a forever kind of love.

Speak to me in your honey suckle voice,
Eyes bright like blue lavender laid out to dry;
I want to be drenched in the stickiness of love.

Sticky like a fly trapped in a spider’s web
But unwilling to try to escape.

Croon to me in your apple cider voice,
Lips puckering at the tartness;
I want to be warmed up in the heat of love.

Hot like an egg frying on the pavement
Ready to be eaten with salt and pepper.

You were poetry. You made my heart beat fast enough to start a car engine, but now I'm suffocating, and you won’t let me catch my breath. You’re a song stuck on repeat - I’m getting sick of you - but you just keep playing. The poem feels repetitive and I’m a lyric away from regurgitating every love song I ever composed for you. The only noise playing in my head is the scarlet letter you wrote back. The letter where you called me as beautiful as a flower, yet ripped the roots of my beauty until there was nothing left to recognize. The letter where you reminded me of the strings you pulled with my veins, the way you controlled the choreography of my body with your presence near; I believed you were an amazing ventriloquist. All you are is a skeleton coming from the back of my closet and I can’t get rid of you in discretion. I want you gone. I don’t know whether to call an exorcist to rebuke the demons in my head or an exterminator to get rid of the termites your corpse has left behind. I want you gone. The memory of your acidic touch is leaving third degree burns that may never heal. The memory of butterflies in my stomach makes me wish a whole zoo trampled me instead. The butterflies have burned a hole inside of me and I can no longer digest chocolate kisses from sweeter times. I now sit in this bed, where we once laid, and write about how badly I want to change this radio station.
You are in every station.
I’m tired of writing tragic rhymes about missing you.
I’m tired of missing you.
This is my final sonnet to you.
And with this, I finally turn the radio off.