i want to live in a nunnery
and devote my life to something i will never understand.
at least i can just accept that i will never understand god
instead of trying to continually make sense of the world.
i envy those whose lives are one whole volume -
unabridged, and yet
still manage to fit from one cover to the other.
while the rest of us, full of breaks and pauses
and multiple volumes
that are either too tragic to print,
or too convoluted to put into words in the first place.
my life is a series of stops and gos,
of commas and semicolons.
infiltrated by question marks,
interspersed with the rare exclamation mark.
i'm just waiting for that full stop,
that 'the end' inked in your sweat that i
will never taste the salt of again.
i am tired of false starts,
of sputtering gas that fuel embers
and never really catch fire.
god only knows how many times i have burned
while trying to put out flames
that were never hot enough
to keep us going.

there are so many question marks and empty spaces in this world
that i wonder if they are ever meant to be filled.
the more i think about them, the more i am convinced
that they're not.
and i find that it doesn't matter,
because i'll never be whole myself.