Words are explosive.
And we drop them without feeling, never knowing the aftereffects and never caring.
Sometimes these words tear through like bullets, and suddenly our bodies have become war zones.
We are fighting with verbal weaponry over everyday things,
"The dishwasher should've been emptied."
"Your grades are too low."
"You hate me? I hate you too."
I've dropped the F-bomb enough times to rival a thousand Hiroshimas, with worse destruction to match.
The tears in my mother's eyes, the anger in my father's throat, the returning hate in my brother's voice.
We've turned linguistics into lashes,
goodbyes into grenades,
inside jokes into IEDs.
We are slowly killing ourselves and everyone around us with mouth-made machine guns and silver-tongued bullets.

Over time, our words start to lose meaning.
The more we use them, the lower the shock value, as if we've become accustomed to seeing missiles fly past our windows during breakfast.
"I love you" becomes an everyday thing, a once destructive phrase that left mouths open and knees trembling, but now contains the emotional value of a Kleenex, that can be replaced by another, just at the tips of our fingers.

My world is a war zone but I want peace.
I crave to have meaning.
I've been through enough fights to know now that I should think before I speak.

I want to capture my words.
To run through fields and bottle them up in Mason jars, ensnaring them between my hands like fireflies,
taking them home and only letting them go out when they need to, so they don't lose their shine.
And when we're sitting there, laying in each others arms, sheets tangled into an underground jungle, I take the glass jars down from their shelves and slowly unscrew them.
They settle on your skin, twinkling stars embedded into your body, reflecting the light through jail-cell eyelashes.

We must learn to turn our backs to the world's war zone.
Only then can we fully love.