Their smile was 6:03 am.

Jarring, mostly, like an alarm set at the wrong time. But comforting when you’re looking for it, when it’s the one thing you need to bring yourself back.

You never know when you’ll wake up with her hair just brushing against your fingers,
the steady rise and fall of her chest accompanied by the light from a laptop playing a movie you know word for word.

Their smile will be the last thing your bleary eyes focus on after a night of subsisting on energy drinks and the thrill of the essay you submitted 30 seconds before the deadline.

You wonder where you are in his arms, if you’re only second place in her heart. Your gaze shifts between him smiling down at you and the neon green alarm clock on your bedside table.

It’s 6:04 am. The sun winks through the blinds. You roll out of bed like clockwork. They grasp your hand before you could get away, kiss your wrist the way they do every Thursday morning, and offer to cook you breakfast.

the lines by her eyes read how she parted the red sea.
her fingertips rub your scalp like she’s writing a testament to every thursday night in your studio apartment.
her voice at 5:54AM will bring you to your knees faster than any choir medley could.
she will ask you to dinner over text, and you will tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids,
skin bleeding,
but every dream has a home inside your head,
a prophecy set in your bedsheets.

you were never quite a righteous woman,
but you’d get baptized in her bathtub,
for there is no deity perfect enough nor cruel enough
to speak her into existence.

The sunlight winks from behind the umbrella of leaves and mangoes overhead. It tickles your cheekbones like the first, second, thirtieth good morning kiss. Your sandals are worn. A woven basket rests heavy on your hip, in your hands.

Your fingers, slender and worn by the earth, trace the contours of my face the way they search for meaning in a dictionary. Gravity. We inch closer. Have you always had a widow’s peak? Your hand finds it rightful place over my heart. I kiss you for the thirty-first time today. You taste of plantains and milk. You smell of sweat and the sun. My hand relishes in the traces of heat on your cheek.

One mango drops from your possession. Unripe, but soon to be opened up and worshipped as it is meant to be. Your fingers grasp the yellowing heart and press it against my lips. I rest against the trunk and sink my teeth into it. Liquid sunrise trickles down your wrist onto my blouse. The leaves create shadow puppets on the ground, the story of two young fools swaying in the shade of a tree.

I walk with you
with only the streetlights
as our chaperones.
My pace slows down,
trying to stretch this
10-minute walk
for 10 minutes more.

Your voice is steady,
but I hear how it cracks
like the ripples on a lake.
I pray to the stars
that the tears in your eyes
are from the smog.

We walk on the side of the street,
arguing over who gets to guard the other
because we know we'll both
walk to the middle of the road
at one point or another.
I win
and push you closer to the side,
feeling your hand in mine.

We reach the gate.
I make you promise
that you won't talk to strangers,
that you won't walk by yourself.
Our pinkies link,
and I feel five years old.

You go home.
I pray once more
for more time by your side,
but you have already crossed the road.
I change my prayer for patience
until I can make you mine.

Please do not hate me
when I fail to say hello.
I am still learning
how to interact with you
without resorting to
my usual, self-deprecating humour.

If there comes a day
when you are finally fed up
with my emotional instability,
please, for the love of God,
let me know.
I do not want to have to think
that everything is okay.
I am already blind enough.

You always kiss me
and tell me that you're fine
with everything I do.
I do not want that all the time.
I do not want to be spoiled,
indolent,
unaware.

I want to grow with you.
I know you are not the answer
to my nail-biting anxiety,
but you are my pillar,
my brown-eyed support system.
I do not want to have to
give you my stress.
I am happy enough
knowing you're still there
willingly.

Fall in love with yourself.

Learn how to be infatuated
with the veins in your hands
and the stretchmarks on your tummy.
Make your own heart race
as you whisper those
three words,
eight letters
to yourself
over and over again.

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.

And mean it.

If you can learn how to
profess your undying love
to the naked, scared figure
in the mirror,
you can learn how to
daydream about a future
where you
and that person
are finally happy.

If you can give
a piece of your heart
to that stranger on the bus,
why can't you give everything
back to yourself?

You,
who picked your broken self up
after dropping to your knees
one too many times.

You,
who dragged your ***
to the toilet
after drinking the night away
(even though you promised
that you wouldn't do it again).

You,*
who wasn't always there,
but tried to make it up to yourself
by covering your wounds
with purple plasters
and starlight.

Because when people
turn out their pockets
with no spare love
to hand to you,
you will stuff your hands into yours
and give them some of your own
without ever running out of supply.

I wish you would realize
what you can still become.
You are here because
the universe willed the atoms
to rearrange themselves
to become *you
and no one else.

You are a crashing orchestra,
a breath of fresh air.
You are decades upon decades upon decades
of destruction and reconstruction
rolled into a tiny voice
and a single choice.
You are much too complex
to be contained in a box.
*You are much too full
of love to share,
but you never keep any of it
for yourself.

My hand searches for yours
under the table
in this semi-crowded place.
Our friends chat amongst themselves,
their words like white noise,
but they glance at me and you,
expecting you to make a move.
No one sees what we are doing,
but they know.

They know.

They grin and give you a thumbs-up.
I sigh,
half out of raging embarrassment,
half out of content.

My hand has found yours,
but now my lips want to do the same.

Don't call me a fool
just because I don't fit your bill.
I am made of mistakes
and ugly laughter.
I am a before,
a right now,
and a happy little after.

I am gritted teeth
and burnt roast beef
and tired eyes
and skinny lies
and bloated bellies
and tiny tellies.

I am shattered hearts
and missing parts
and miniskirts
and false new starts.

I am that one channel
your parents don't let you watch,
or a giant, messy void
called a black ink splotch.
I am peer pressure,
irresponsibility,
and midnight crises
pushed into a fleshbag
to walk around the world.

Don't control my life
just because you can't control
your own.
I have my own place in this world-
-a place called the throne.

The silence greets me
after a deep slumber
filled with hallucinations.
It envelopes me in its
chilly, thin arms.
I am deafened,
defeated.

The silence is a companion,
a ghost in this city.
It's never really gone,
but only hidden
in a mess of noise and decibels.

The silence screams the loudest
when I'm alone with my thoughts.
It taunts me,
telling me I have no friends.
It doesn't realize that
it has become my friend.

The silence is awake.
It never rested.
It just clothed itself
in cries and screams.
I no longer wear earplugs.
I still hear it
when it takes its robes off.

Unwrap me.
Strip me of this vessel.
Shake this bottle,
this container,
until the insides bubble up.
Challenge my everything.
Yell.
Scream.
Cry out your battlecry.
I will do the same,
matching your tone,
copying your voice.
I will do the same
until I can no longer speak.
I will best you
in this contest of screams
until I feel the redness in my cheeks.
I will shake the mountains
with my voice alone.
Every word I say
sets a landmine off,
so let the explosions come.
I have so much more to say.

On the sixth day,
God created Man.
On the seventh day,
God rested.
And for days and days onwards,
Man demanded
more, more, more.

We devoured every piece of fruit
from the Tree of Knowledge,
yet we still held out our grubby,
juice-stained hands,
asking Him
for more of the forbidden ammonia.

And still,
God provided.

His tired hands,
worn from work,
fashioned miracle after miracle
to feed our selfish desires
yet
it
was
never
enough.

To call ourselves
the superior species
would be too self-gratuitous,
too unfitting.

How can we call humankind
the top of the food chain
when humankind
has lost all of its humanity?

I wish they clipped
the wings off Icarus's back
before he took flight.

It would have been easier that way.

He could have stayed flightless,
some sort of meatsack
with little wax stumps
growing out of his back,
not unlike those of trees.

The story of Icarus
was not made to scare us
away from flying
too close to the sun.

The story of Icarus
was made to scare us
from flying at all.

We covered our broken bones
with stars and plastic hope
just to feel beautiful again.

We asked strangers on the street
to kiss our scars
because we couldn't do it ourselves.

We broke down,
tore ourselves apart,
in the hopes of turning into
something better.

She was made to satisfy the greed of everyone else.

You never use
the word "friend."
It's always
"peasant,"
"idiot,"
"*****"
with you.
You never want
to be touched,
yet you end up
groping me in
two distinct places.

One minute,
we're covering up our laughter
over something dumber
than ourselves.
The next minute,
you're stone-cold,
unreachable,
sharper than a knife,
a robot in a little girl's skin.

It hurts.
I want to break things off.
I desperately try to
cut off any connections,
but my stupid, stupid brain
pushes me back,
forcing me to crawl back to you
on my hands and knees,
the blisters and bruises still flowering
my palms and feet,
but I still keep running after you.

But you never notice.
You never care.
But I still wish,
*******, I still wish
that you would at least just
call me your friend.

If your tired eyes start to close
    and you can't seem to see clearly,
rest your weary head in the clouds
    floating, wandering overhead.
While you're up there in the sky,
    why don't you take a peek at the view?

I wish I were the one
you wait for online.
The one who makes you
bite your thumb,
hyperventilate,
enter a state of bliss and fear
as soon as you see my name.
Instead, it's the other way around.

I feel butterflies in my stomach,
in my chest,
in my lungs,
threatening to make their way
out of my mouth,
to spill out and run out in the open.

My fingers are too frozen
to type out two letters,
let alone an entire sentence.
They are too preoccupied
covering my mouth
to stop me from screaming
when you send me a message.

"hey. :)"

And before I could stop it,
the first butterfly
flutters out of me.

I always hid under the stars,
because they told me
they'd protect me
the way they protected you.
"It's the least we could do,"
they commented when
they thought I couldn't
hear them,
*"especially since we did
such a shoddy job
with the previous fella."

i reached out to catch stars. i caught you instead.

i fruitlessly waste time searching for the time i lost.

It’s already midnight.* Go to sleep, dear.
   You have a brand new day ahead of you.
He’s already in his bed,
   dreaming of someone else.
Why are you still wide awake,
   quietly proclaiming your love for him?
The only person who can hear your confession
   is you, the lovestruck insomniac.

My heart was always
in the wrong place.
The things that didn’t
matter at all,
I gave them my all.
I wasted so much energy on
useless pish.
Terminal friendships.
Unsalveagable projects.
Lost causes.

I used up so much of my time,
hoping that I could fix them,
like a lost child
trying to stop a burning house.
A stranger stuck outside in the rain
without an umbrella or a jacket.
But sometimes, you just have to
put the water bucket down,
stop looking for shelter,
and give up.

she took back
every single apology
that she ever gave.

he called her a princess,
while she called him blind.

today, i thought of
falling in love with someone.
i burst out laughing.

the peeling paint is suddenly so exciting
when you have something else to do.
a million pounds of expectations rests on my head,
choking me, scaring me.
but does it really matter anymore?
petty pleas of help tend to fall on deaf ears.

For once, I would like to pretend
that my hair looks fine and my thighs are slim.
For once, I want to feel as if I could walk outside
without regretting my taste in clothes.
For once, even if it'll only last for a single, fleeting moment,
is it too much to ask to feel pretty and presentable?

I am the chain between yesterday and tomorrow.
The center, the filling between the endless ends.
When the before is no more,
when the after is yet to come.
The past will eventually disintegrate,
and the nebulous future is merely a hazy window.
But what about me?
I myself am always here.
I myself am the eternal *now.

There he is.
God, he looks like a dork.
Not *my dork, no.
Far from it, actually.
He’s just a dork
who just so happens
to dribble my heart around
in his rough, warm hands
without even realizing it.

There he is.
Oh, ****. He’s smiling my way.
Wait, wait, no.
His eyes so brown,
so ******* brown,
aren’t on me.
I turn around.

There she is.
She’s waving him over.
Oh.
Her.
She’s nice.
They’d make a cute couple,
now that I think about it.
The thought makes my stomach flip
like some sort of surprised pancake.

It hurts.
But after the first hundred times,
you get used to disappointment.
You accept it like a champ,
accepting the fact
that he’s someone else’s dork.

I reach out, begging,
waiting as I hold my breath,
hoping for the waves to return,
to stretch out,
to splash against my sand-coated feet.
Staring out at the ocean,
I wish.
I dream.
I pray.
But somewhere in my mind,
I have long since given up.
Call it selfishness,
call it greed.
Never will the ocean touch my flesh,
but I still crave to hold the salty water
up to my dry, cracked lips,
embracing its sting,
crying out for the sweetness
you and I long lost.