maybe i just
care too much for you -
i care so much that it destroys me
a little bit every day.
you would laugh at me
if you knew of my lavender dreams
of sunshine and kisses and you,
but i do not feel
like it is foolish to love you
much rather, it is what i need -
maybe i need to love someone
to feel like i'm able to feel


cs

"life is a gamble at terrible odds
if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it"
it seems like i already have;
on the inside, i spin coins against myself.
life's odds are not as bad without love
but love has odds stacked high against me;
especially in moments like this
when i marvel over how beautiful he looks
against the city lights at 2am -
moments like this one end up being
moments in which he leans over to my friend
and tells her she is the prettiest he's ever seen.
(she, later on, will tell me she thinks he's not too bad
i will, to myself, scoff at her understatement
but tell her to go for him, "he's cute"
and spend that night crying on my own)
if love was a bet, you wouldn't take it
but i already have.
against the city lights at 2am,
he calls me a taxi and that's the last i'll see of him.


cs

sometimes phrases don't make it into poems
and paragraphs are written but not part of the book.
love is just like that.
so don't you dare tell me that i can't
feel heartache over what i never had
i have the right to feel pain when she holds his hand
and feel sick when he tells me of their first kiss
and feel like it should be me even though it never was.
i have the right to love what does not love me back
and feel pain from the loss of a love i never had
just like this is not a real poem
and it won't make it into any book
but i still write it, by myself,
and it exists.


cs

she loved cold winter nights
the way that most people
love summer warmth -
i think
it made her feel warmer
from the inside when it was
cold around her, like that way
she could pretend there wasn't
ice enveloping her heart.


cs

i wonder if you sometimes think of me - not the way i think of you,
i know that you don't see me the way that i see you
(like you're my sun and like you hung the stars,
like you're the most beautiful thing i have ever seen)
but i sometimes wonder if i sometimes cross your mind,
i wonder if my face pops up behind your eyes,
and if you wonder if that is because I've thought of you
(if that saying was true, you would only be seeing me);
i wonder if what you see me as, and if you know that
every time i look at you, my heart wants to run away from me,
i wonder if you can see it in my blush, or if my friends have told you.
i wonder if you've ever thought what it would be like
to be in love with me. it's all i do every day, after all,
(or rather every night) to think about what we could be,
when i know, deep within me, that we never could.
i wonder if you sometimes think of me, or if
i am as far from your mind as that one boy was from mine,
the one who told me that he loved me, the one i told
that you cannot love someone from afar, not truly.
i have tried to apologise to him, but he has moved away,
and now i am him and you are me, except you are
so much more perfect than anything that i could ever be.
i know you'll never think of me the way i think of you,
i know that you could never love me the way that i do you,
i know that you could never look at me like i am
the most beautiful thing this planet has ever seen,
and i know that you are an unrequited dream.
but i wonder if you sometimes think of me - not the way i think of you,
but just at all. for all the hope i don't allow myself, i still hope you do.


cs

my friend doesn't believe me when i say i was upset
she says, at least you had enough composure to
talk about it and defend yourself. i answer with
an awkward laugh, "i guess i'm kinda good at
pretending i'm not crying on the inside," i say.
neither of us realised, in that one moment,
how true my words had been, not even me.
she laughed and still didn't believe me and i
never stopped to think about what i had said.
now, in the dark of the night, it catches up with me -
i am a master of disguise, dressed up as an
eighteen-year-old with a permanent smile, i am
the queen of all actors, with an optimism
that people say is my best quality, when it is one
that i have never had. i guess i'm kinda good at
pretending i'm not crying on the inside, because
that seems to be all i do every day, and it seems like
it has become what i am now.
there is an art to faking happiness for so long that
people say it is what makes you you, when really,
sadness is what makes up your soul.
it is a mastered art when you start believing it yourself,
when you have to think back and realise that
you were miserable the whole time, because
even to yourself you look happy in the pictures.
i guess we are all good at something, after all -
though, for me, it is not the smile that you adore,
or the optimism that has picked you up at times,
or the enthusiasm for trying new things.
for me, it is the art of faking a new me,
the art of acting in everyday life, all day,
the art of fooling even myself with the notion
that i could ever be happy.