There is not enough coffee in this world to keep my soul awake,
not when I cannot sleep most nights but rise before the sun,
and my eyes sting sharply every second they are open,
unable to stand the brightness of the world and its people —
not when it is plastered over misery and poverty, and hopeless hearts.
There is not enough sunlight in this world to light up what we bury
in the dark, with memories and bodies and time capsules,
not enough band aids to cover up the pain our mistakes have caused,
and there can never be enough time to undo regret.

I live in the constant knowledge that I was not enough
to change the world, or myself in it, or to make you understand
that despite being eloquent, I am not articulate enough
to describe how I feel, about you and this planet, both filled
with endless riddles, and pain, but, inexplicably, also love.

Like so many of us, surrounded by binaries and cold concrete,
he finds it hard to say what he feels, and I found it hard
to understand, for a while, that he loved me just as I did him,
when he never vocalised his feelings completely, and I did.
It took me some time to realise he shows them instead, and maybe
that is all the more eloquent than anything I could ever
materialise on a piece of paper filled with smeared ink.
His love manifests itself in lingering gazes and the lightest touch,
in private smiles and the softening of his eyes when I laugh.
Like a child resorts to pointing at things they cannot name,
he ends up holding close what he cannot verbalise he needs.

- “You make me happy,” I tell him. He looks vulnerable and smiles. c.s.

I am in love with a man who bleeds sunlight
and whose eyes wash tsunamis against
the harsh shadows of his lashes on his cheeks.
He hides an untamed storm inside of him,
waves crashing into rocky shores while the sky
drowns in blue; and I drowned in him.

He is not a robin, but he carried my heart
through bleeding skies and fireworks.
He is gone now, chasing after new dreams
while I bury what he’s decided has died
and choke on the secrets I never realised
he kept from me, hanging on my wall in
a morbid display of blindness and loss.

My heartache is a war cry in the darkest night,
shattering the windows of my soul until
tears leak out to grow a new Atlantic,
now that I cannot look in his eyes again.
I drown in the knowledge that he has
covered me with scars from wounds that
never were mine, but that I bled from still.

I hope one day he can learn to love
something without making it bleed, and
maybe I can learn to remake my heart
out of something that isn’t glass, and
not to giftwrap it every time I feel warmth,
and to stay far away from the shore.

- He is a hurricane, and I have always loved storms. c.s.

“You don’t know what it’s like
to be this empty,” he tells me
and that’s true, I don’t
but I know how it feels
to want to fill the space.

i hope you're happy, wherever you are, with what you are doing.
you do not know that i am not, and i both cannot change it
and would not even if i could - this is who we are now.
we have drifted apart and while you have found an island and
invited all our friends, nobody speaks to me and the saltwater burns my skin.
i am sorry for what i said, but not for what happened -
i just wish it had happened differently. i am sorry for telling you
how i felt when i had never done so before - it was new to you.
you must understand that while i hate how things are now,
i cannot regret much - i do not mean to sound callous,
but rather i want to, just once, tell the truth - while am lonely, i am free.
you may not realise the toxicity of your words as they caress your tongue
but they burned my skin with their acidic touch
and dissolved my soul into something i neither recognised nor liked.
i wish you all the best, and you'll remain a part of me,
but now i cannot bear to see your face because i have seen
what it looks like under the mask of lipstick smiles and sharp eyeliner
and the truth of who you were to me, and made me be, is terrifying.
still, while you made me something i cannot be while keeping myself,
you made me smile and feel something akin to ... happiness, i suppose;
so i watch you take away what i have left without resentment -
i know you feel you need revenge, and i will not be the one
to keep your closure from you when i am finding mine.
this is the last present i can still give to you now that i'm gone.
i hope the spring air washes the poison off your tongue,
and that you can be happy with the people who loved me once;
i hope you can find enough happiness to neutralise the acidic hate
that made me leave a person i loved so immensely behind.
i have never been the one who left, but i cannot go on.

i know that you do not love yourself.
you never pretend you do, just
sometimes pretend to be alright.
i like to think i understand you
better than that, that i see through
red-painted lips faking a smile;
i like to think i know you a little;
enough, at least, to see beneath
the skin i fear is littered with scars and
see the dark blue sea of nothingness.
i feel like i can watch you drown some days,
pulled under by its waves of despair
and somehow, you're forgetting how to swim.
i wish that i could pull you out,
but i cannot reach you and i wish
that i was strong enough, just enough.
i know this is not how it works and yet
my heart clenches because i know
you are in your room crying
and i am in mine, too far away,
and all i can do is fill pages with thoughts
and worries, handwriting shaky.
i do not know how to help you;
i do not know how to be enough
to make you feel good enough.

i missed your skin when you were east,
yearned for your touch as we slept under the same stars
and yet you were miles and an ocean away from feeling
my hands touch yours and my mouth love your lips
as we both looked at the same moon at different times,
and i felt cold raindrops hit my face while you
watched as apple blossoms glittered in the sun;
you studied words written long before our time
and called me late at night to whisper flowing stanzas
of iloveyous that were smoke in the blackness of a room
while i listened and we both pretended not to hear my tears
become stains on a pillowcase that did not feel like mine
(for the absence of your scent on it, and because it was not).
at day, i surrounded myself with things that could not be further
from everything you loved, if only to not think of your smile.
i swung scalpels like heavy swords in an eternal war
against the cruel sisters who had chosen to separate us,
as if the miles between us were their scissors to our pieces of string;
and i calculated numbers that told me people's fate
while remembering how you always hated mathematics.
your words were like balsam to my soul, the way i hoped
i could one day be for everyone, and you always
seemed to suffer so much less than me, because i did not know
of the tears you shed after putting down your phone.
you missed my lips while i dreamt of you at night,
and as the atlantic roared between us, i thought how
fitting it was that tears are made of saltwater.