“Take my hand.”

Take my lips, my clothes, my body; take all the confidence we got off on
dancing across the kerosene-doused floor in the heat of each other’s skin,
slowly learning what it truly meant to love and to have someone to love,
as the flames of romance consumed us faster than we could consume each other.

Take this unusually large water bottle and this board game you’ve always wanted
as if our brutal game of trial and error wasn’t painful enough,
immaturity dripping from eager eyes, and expiration dates on gift receipts,
when I should have been giving you all the things fire cannot burn.

So here, allow me try again:

Take my words.

Take every grain of honesty I’m on my knees picking up one by one
after carelessly falling from the train of thought making its way to you,
spending all those years helplessly lost in translation under rusty railways
because our tongues were only fluent in the language of each other’s touch.

Take the vulnerability my mother always warned me not to wear on my sleeves,
as I sloppily weave out raw poetry at the ends of my skirt while she’s not looking,
loosely tucking fervent yearnings between cotton pleats for you to thumb through,
and hoping that my verses are worth more stares than the thighs they cover.

Take my growth.

Take all the pieces of my heart that fell the day I cracked it open in front of you,
foolishly thinking it was fortune cookie I could somehow draw a lesson from,
and that the acidity of acceptance was a taste I had to acquire until I no longer gag
at every I should’ve and I could’ve that comes with saying your name out loud.

Take every crease and every tear searing across my fragile, unripe skin
from having the cost of loving forcefully rip apart my soul from this child’s body,
as I sift through what little is left and cut all my fingers trying to piece together
the woman you need me to be, and the woman I need myself to be.

Take my hope.

Take every star left illuminating across the cold and empty galaxies of my eyes,
where the only constellations I can seem to trace are those that point to you,
spilling incandescence over all the spaces that stretched too far between us,
and finally shedding light into the hungry mouths of apologies and hello agains.

Take every tomorrow and every someday I tuck under my pillow at night
with an optimism kept burning by nothing more than just the warmth of your smile,
as loving you from afar teaches me what it truly means to have a religion:
faithfully holding on to a promise I never heard, a hand I can no longer hold.

Take my time.

Take the patience bleeding out of me like sand from a broken hourglass,
as I slowly begin to unravel my mistakes from the unforgiving hands of a clock,
knowing well that the yesterdays of the last three years are not enough for me,
so I save all my everydays and my evermores in a box with your name on it.

Take my heart and every fraction of a second it takes for it to beat,
as it longs for the warmth of the home it once found on the palm of your hand,
withstanding all the flames that engulfed the paradise precariously built around it,
and out of the ashes, still rising to beat for you: but still, but still, but still.