she was a novel
with twists and turns
the kind shoved behind
library bookshelves
and under heartsick beds

she spun words
into velvet
and they seeped
right through her lips
and onto his lonely skin

and oh, how she loved him
with the passion of a sunset
and the bravery of a child
and her words craved him
even more than she did

he was the reason why
her eyes strained a torturous fog
and her words clogged her throat
and a dozen unsent letters
desperately cluttered her room
and her words weren't velvet,
they were just word
and just like her,
they were not worth loving anymore

it's been one whole year
one whole revolution around the sun
365 days of wondering why
you told me i was your everything
but you left it all behind

how could you leave everything behind?

you left me with empty hands
after i gave you the whole world
but i am not your sun
and you do not revolve around me like you used to

one whole year
of broken promises and mumbled friendship
and memorizing each other
like the backs of our hands
even though i'm not sure if
i still want to remember you
anymore

you're the throbbing pain
and also the heavenly relief
and even though i cannot stand the thought of you,
you still take up the most space
in my mind

If he makes you feel like you are just the sum of your flesh and bones, run away. Run as fast as you can and do not dare look back. The rush of cold air will light your lungs on fire anyway, but keep running until your legs give out and you find yourself somewhere far away.  Once you leave the past behind, you are no longer a girl with stringy hair and beady eyes who fell asleep every night with her throat burning of choked-back tears and missing him. You are no longer the empty girl who counted seconds waiting for a sign to stay. You are, and always will be, greater than the sum of the stars in the sky. You are the bird's song and the rain's hum. You are every seedling sprouting in an open field, but you yourself are responsible for your new beginning. Do not let anyone tell you that you are equal to the scars that scatter your skin or the empty face staring back at you in the mirror. When you finally find yourself somewhere far, far away, I hope you also find who you really are.

maybe one day
i won't have to wait for a call
glancing at the clock
as empty seconds pass by
because you'll be calling me
from the kitchen instead

maybe one day
i won't have to wonder
what our hands would feel like
intertwined
because we'd be too busy
not letting go

i'm still waiting for the day
that i won't have to write
poems about missing you,
wondering if you still love me
because you'll be lying next to me
whispering the hundreds of reasons
why you do

one of my favorite things in the world is the way i catch you smiling after we talk. there's something so captivating about the way you smile to yourself when you think i'm not looking (but i am, i always am.) i have memorized the way your hair catches the rays of sunlight and how you hold your head up in class when you are too busy falling asleep to pay attention. i think that your eyes are windows that hold thousands of different galaxies within them and lately it has been killing me that one day i will no longer be one of them. you always saw things the way i did and i could have sworn our souls were tied together in another life. i find myself getting tired of love stories but i don't think it's possible that i could ever get tired of ours. we were never about red roses or cheesy valentine's day cards or sloppy makeout sessions in the back of the movie theatre like the other kids, but that's okay. shy "good mornings" and deep midnight conversations mean more to me than anything left in the world. you can write anything on a blank sheet of paper and call it poetry, but our story is not just a puddle of words and fractured sentences. it is not a menagerie of fancy words dressed up to look like they mean something, because our story is the epitome of beautiful. i understand that time is just the sad ticking sound of the lonely clock on the wall, but if a genie granted me three wishes, i would wish for more of it with you. forevers are always infinite and i know it's hard for a girl like me to wrap her mind around a concept like that, but all i know is that i'll never be ready to spend an infinity without you by my side.

i was in the seventh grade
when i met a boy in a red shirt
whose voice sounded a lot like home,
and i remember hearing them say

"silly girl,
you're only thirteen years old,
you don't even know what love is!"

but who are they to judge
when their ancient bodies
have already forgotten
what it felt like to be yound
and electrified?

who cares if it isn't their
dictionary definition of true love,
i'd still rather be young and clueless and trembling
with my veins pumping his name
over and over again
than having to spend the rest of my life
away from the only thing
i'll ever love enough to call
home

i used to write about him
endlessly
in tattered journal pages
and in cheesy poems
but i didn't want to admit it

i didn't want to admit
the fact that he was gone
and writing him into paper
wasn't going to bring back
the person i once knew

i didn't want to admit
that i wasn't in love-
that instead, i was cold and lonely
for endless summer nights
in the pitch black vacuum of my room
when everyone else was sound asleep
and i should've been, too
i guess at that time
i just didn't want to admit
the fact that i was too busy writing
to realize i was just lying to myself

so this is me finally admitting it-
this is my apology letter
for blindly lying to myself,
for believing the miserable lie
that writing about him
would bring us back to life

because so far it hasn't worked
and i'm undeniably sick
of lying to myself
and ignorantly believing it will