Break my heart because my pain draws me closer to life.
Give me broken love.  I want scars on my heart, I want to ******* salty tears dripping down my face like blood at 5 in the morning while I listen to the mixed tape you made me on repeat.      
Give me messy love. The kind where we eat breakfast for dinner, and ride bicycles naked in the snow. You will read books about travellers and I will lie on the floor making paper aeroplanes because being with you is enough.                                                          ­          
Make me want to **** myself so that I am able to feel alive again.

You sit and watch the flames dancing up into the ink stained night
You want to be devoured by the darkness.
You want to be engulfed and dazzled by flames,
Here, now,
It is cold,
And you’re so young and scared.
I can still feel your warm breath against my body whispering beautiful lies into my ear.
I remember the way you would hold me tightly because you knew that every inch of me was breaking.
You couldn’t fix me.

I have an urge for the insane, for the thrill of living. I cannot stand to sit and wonder about the “what ifs” or the “if only”.  I have an impulse to leave, to keep driving, to throw my map out the window and trace the atlas engraved on my heart. I have an urge to run, to leave the menial behind and escape from comfort and security. Take me far away from the matchbox houses with the people inside who live a lie. I want to meet the ones who are not afraid to be mad. I want to dance with strangers in cluttered living rooms while listening to songs that make me happy to be alive. I am desperate for an altered perspective and to have conversations with travellers whose only comfort is the open road. Let me dance through rings of fire with fairies who play drums in circles, let me get lost in the song of my ancestors. I do not care about trivial matters, I care about what you ache for, the thoughts that consume you to your core and keep you up night after night. Show me your scars. I have a desire to drink lemonade in the desert and paint moons on my lovers back, the desire to live fearlessly.  I want messy love, sweaty love, broken love, to become my own, to be gorgeously human.

When it happens his mouth is nothing like they’ve taught you to expect. Just more flesh slipping and sliding against yours. He grabs you as though all you are is just another thing he wants to conquer, he wants to take control of, and then he wants to forget. He grabs your ******* pretending it was a mistake but doesn’t let go. And before you’ve realised it happened, it’s over.

He leaves you to get dressed alone.

He drives you home and you press your body against the car door, never looking at him because you’re too ashamed. When you arrive outside your house and he leans in to kiss you. You close your eyes and try remember your grandmothers cooking or the smell of the spray your overbearing mother uses to clean the house - anything that doesn’t make you want to throw up.

You walk into your room and the mirror with butterflies and fairies on the frame mock you because you can’t even look at your own reflection.

You hold hands, pretend to watch a movie, fake a laugh at all the appropriate moments. He kisses you again, following some internal rhythm that you are uncomfortable dancing to. It feels as though you are a character in a play, every action you repeat has been rehearsed over and over again. This is nothing like they have taught you to expect. You were told that love was supposed to be easy. Pretending has become second nature to you. Your stomach turns uncontrollably as you lean your head on his cold shoulder, the day is nearly over.

In the car he drives passed the park because it’s the fastest way to your house, even though you tell him every drive that you want to go passed the lake so you can look at the ducks you used to feed when you were little. Today you do not mind that he is taking you the faster way because you don’t know how much longer you can hold your breath for before you pass out. You watch the children screaming, and how you wish you could scream. Still not looking him in the eyes you kiss him goodbye, you can feel acid in the back of your throat.

At home you wonder if you can wash the memory of him away, because toothpaste only replaced the taste of him from your bleeding mouth.

This is nothing like they’ve taught you to expect. It takes you four more boys until you get it right. Until you meet the one that doesn’t look at you like you are something to eat. He presses his hand onto the small of your back and kisses your tears. He feels like petals, like those hazy summer days when the sun is as hot as the desert sky.

You,


I need you to come back and rock me to sleep so that the demons don’t show up tonight. I need you to pretend that you still love me.

With you I had endless dreams of falling through the rabbit hole, the psychedelic rays of the earth would tickle my feet and I would lean in closer to you, knowing that I was safe. Without you the red queen swallows me whole and the rabbit runs away leaving me in a darkness so cold and empty, just like the mug of coffee that still sits on your bedside table.

I need you to come back and rock me to sleep while you stargaze upon the constellation of freckles scattered across my spine. Allow my mind to connect with yours so that I can get drunk off the colours of the sky and giggle at the sound of my own breath.

I need you to come back and rock me to sleep because I cannot close my eyes without seeing flashbacks of you in my memories. It plays over and over like a record stuck on repeat. Your song feels like daggers in my ears. My stomach aches because without you the butterflies are replaced with wasps stinging me as each second passes.

I need you to come back and rock me to sleep while you whisper in my ear the excuses as to why you left me in the first place. I need you to hold me so close that I am overwhelmed with the need to question my existence. I need you to rip apart my chest and force your way back into my bleeding heart, even though we both know you never left to begin with.

I need you to come back and rock me to sleep.




Me.

Death is easy, peaceful. Life is harder.

I sat on the top of the highest building in town. My eyes were stained red from crying. I wondered what death would feel like, I imagined it like the ocean, the tide pulling you deeper and deeper into a dream. The wind was howling, blowing my hair in all different directions, it sounded angry, as though it was cursing the world. As I leaned my head further back I saw a thousand stars, it felt like being at the top of a mountain, I could reach my hand above my head and run my fingers through the clouds.

Death will always compare to the ocean. And I can’t help but compare everything to the ocean. I am darkness, I will always be guided by the evil impulses that envelop through my body and lead me to swallow the demons of my past. I compare you to water, you are pure and as fresh as the crisp morning sky of spring. You are everything I am not, your light attacks me trying to burn through the monsters resting in my heart.

You tried to mould me. When I look into your eyes my mind is overwhelmed by the ray of colour you can pass through my veins. The way in which you heart rhymes with the vibrations of the ocean, you connect me to the universe and when I am with you I am grounded. You allow me to forget about the way in which people would look at me and see their nightmares in my eyes.

A rain drop splattered down my cheek. Anger turning to sadness. I became conscious and realised I was thinking of you, again. I want to tell you that the daisies you bought me the day we ran through the park at sunrise are dying. I want to tell you that I need to move with the wind and dance with fire. I want to tell you that I am running away again. It was never you. I was always them. I tried to stay but now I am dizzy.
It’s me.

If only I could understand the reason for my crying. If only I could stop this fear of dreaming that I am dying.
I close my eyes and jump.
I fly now.

I woke up at 3 AM in the bathtub filled to the brim with ice cold water. My clothes were sticking to my body like a second layer of skin and my lips were stained red. This is not the first time I have woken up in a place I don’t remember falling asleep. My life has been a series of slow motion pictures lately, I close my eyes for five minutes and before I know it three weeks have gone by. I’m losing myself and it scares me.

“Andrew, sometimes you have to break your own heart to set yourself free,” she whispered in my ear before slinging her ruck **** over her bony shoulders, leaving me at the airport surrounded by thousands of people but only wanting one. I knew this would happen, and I am not saying that because I wanted to be right. From the moment I saw her I knew that we had no future. For the past few months I have been struggling to write, just as I had been struggling to write for years before I met her, Emily was my inspiration. However as I sit here at my computer I am empowered by the fact that I can write, with or without her, I can write about her, about us.

Emily left home when she was 16 years old, for reasons I will never know. From then she was a wanderer, forever on the road. She had no compass inside her, she just kept walking... I used to sit and write in coffee shops, smoking copious amounts of cigarettes while seeking inspiration from the people who passed by. I was so ordinary, almost faking pain, I will never understand why so many people do that. We are all in love with the idea of being messed up.

“What are you doing?” she said as she put yet another cup of black coffee on the ink stained table, “I am an artist” I said without looking up. “No, you’re a cliché.” She said laughing.

Emily was the most honest person I had ever met. We spent that night together, she took me to the beach and walked across the edge of where the ocean met the sand like an acrobat balancing on her tippy toes. The only way I can describe her is daylight, whether that is a compliment or not I let her decide. Emily was true, her reality was no different from my reality only she didn’t hide from her pain – her true pain, not the fantasy of being messed up. However real she was, I couldn’t help but believe that I made her up. She was a drifter, and I was in love with her.