It isn’t much longer after we find happiness again that we feel ourselves falling back down to the bottom of it all. The scariest part? We still have our mailbox down there. Our welcome mats. Our doorsteps still have those cracks in them that kinda scare you into thinking there’s something much more scarier than that place and we just haven’t kissed depression hard enough on the mouth yet to get there.

But you know what’s a lie? The lie is that once you fall back into that just-warm-enough bed, you will never ever want to leave. You will never ever escape. You will never ever get a chance to see your problems face to face. The lie that there will never be enough stones from rock bottom to skip across the pond; keep skipping rocks until one of them makes a sound loud enough for search and rescue. There are rocks being thrown from every moonlit sidewalk and coffee shop, enough to make a noise loud enough that the angels tell God to shut us up.

There is no eureka moment in brokenness. There is wanting, there is learning, and there is growing.

We’ll grow up to not want anything anymore. We’ll learn then what we need.

I saw you in my reflection once. You were yellow in the golden hour and you shined like you were baptized in glitter, and I could’ve sworn right then and there that time stood still. Every clock in the house stopped at once, and I knew that meant you were something born out of everything I find perfect in this world. I stuck my hand out and offered to pull you through, but let’s be honest, if something is perfect, we should keep it right where it is. But it never works like that. Someone gets selfish. Someone starts a fire that they can’t put out, lights a match that shouldn’t be lit, dowses every crack in the concrete with alcohol. We didn’t care how dangerous we were, we just wanted to say we felt something. We wanted to dance. So we danced, and danced, and danced until our sweat felt like rain clouds. Like rain clouds. Like rain clouds. Drip drop onto our hands and knees and pray all night like God was listening. Like it meant something. Like we’d both not care in the morning when the war was over, but we had to go and pick sides. We were so young then, when we thought that actions spoke louder than words and we took each other’s hands and looked into the mirror, that morning, and kissed each other on the cheek. How innocent. How sweet and beautiful. And innocent.

In a world far far away from ours, I like to envision the people there. The beings, there. How they feel things, if at all. And how they express themselves. If they feel what’s right and what’s wrong, or if they know what forgiveness is, or if they even have a need for it. And if they do, how is it painted across their faces? Is it ugly? Or is it understood?

If they are able to understand the forgiveness, how do they express it? Through words, actions, being quiet, or taking no action at all? And if so, how stagnant does their love become once the ugliness of their forgiveness becomes quiet as snow?

Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe they have no desire for forgiveness because their wrongs don’t amount to rights, or their rights to their wrongs. How beautiful must that feel? What we all would give to feel flawless inside of our morals, never taking for granted the misery we fill ourselves up with just by misunderstanding forgiveness.

In that world so far, far away, how are apologies painted? Or have they all collectively come to the conclusion that they should not need to apologize for the space between our worlds, and we should not need to forgive them for it, simply because it was created that way.

It feels so immeasurably invalidating to confront the fact that we are as simple as children until the day that we die, and every day until then, we dress up in our suits and ties and parade the idea of forgiveness,

just hoping that we can become a martyr for it.

I wish our eyes lit up every time we saw each other again, like those street lamps did so bright into the late 2am in the morning Ohio summer sky, like those headlights onto those Cincinnati exit highway signs, like those I told you sos, like the laughters of those old ghosts in your backyard, I could’ve sworn we were going to break through into forever

Until it all came crashing through the ceiling, until it all came bursting through the floorboards, until we learned how to set fire to our own heads to finally see something go up in smoke, breathe it in, breathe it in, this is where it ends now, the period of every sentence, the exclamation point that paired so well with every I love you finally danced out of our throats and left a space that could not be filled without confrontation

How much longer are we going to pretend every word we ever said to each other was meant to fix whatever was broken

What was broken

Why were we trying to fix it

Why did we make each other god
We both know that eventually we stop believing in whatever doesn’t show us proof

I was like a hummingbird, you were like nectar, I ate you up until there was none of you left, but I kept some of the nectar in my mouth, and fear, and when there was no nectar left in my mouth, it got cold, I flew south for the winter, I was scared

When it warms up out here we might see each other again

How cold will it be, how much of you will be left, how much of us will be left, if any

My wings will be dripping with nectar, I’ll be so ready to make you whole again

I have learned to trust beauty that comes from my body and elsewhere

I have mapped out the rivers that flow through my arms and into my chest,
And I have memorized them and labeled them as “Something So Much Better Now”

I have knitted and patched up the tears and fractures in my bones, placed there by strangers who did not know themselves as well as they pretended to

I am learning to appreciate the rain aside from sleepless nights, besides,
Sometimes even the sky has to cry

Every evening I have taught myself how to tuck myself in again, kiss my own forehead, and chant myself bedtime stories,
And every morning I have taught myself how to appreciate opening the blinds and cracking the windows to smell whatever roses the bees are flocking to at 9am on a warm summer morning

And yet I know that the cold is coming back,
And I know summer is as short as a child’s attention span,
And winter has been harsh before, but that does not mean it cannot learn from its mistakes like I have, and still am

But I am learning, I am relearning

And with that, I will teach myself how to respect the colder weather like a mother or father

With strict discipline, openness, a warm hug, and trust

This script has been written a hundred times over, and much like the rain, it will show itself less before it comes back again,
And sometimes it is heavy, sometimes it is soft,
It will kiss your forehead to sleep and then wake you up in the morning, sometimes like it is begging at your window for some kind of help, other times like it is just sitting on your windowsill, staring at you with bright eyes and a lust for washing away whatever has hurt you

I sit at this desk with flowers and candles and a whole hearse worth of broken words to express over a keyboard,
And the script will be a masterpiece until it isn’t anymore

And I will pick out the actors and actresses using the names of hearts I am not invited into anymore,
And I will play out the script on the stage I call my bedroom floor,
Dance around until the early morning with or without the memories of emotions I do or don’t feel anymore towards these people

And what a curse it is here,
Having writer’s block at this keyboard because I’ve drowned out the words for the script with the rain of someone else’s clouds,
No umbrellas to catch whatever comes falling from the sky,
just drops of rain on my glasses and soaked button ups

And by the time my clothes are dried and my glasses are wiped clean,
When I look back at my keyboard and then the screen,
The script is back to the first sentence I started with, and it has been like this a hundred times over now

When I finally finish this script, what will stop the rain from loving it too much?

Yeah, I can tell you I’ve been finding my intimacy inside of someone else’s skin,
I’ve been avoiding contact with my own garden,
I’m too scared to come back, I don’t know what the flowers will say when they see me, and I’m too afraid that I won’t have enough water for all of them, I don’t want to see them like that,
Dried up and dying, but I guess we all get to that point

My organs have been feeling like empty warehouses with dust and lack of emotional labor,
It’s really ***** around here, and I don’t have enough in me to hire someone to help,
And I don’t have enough in me to fix everything that’s wrong inside of them,
I’ve been hoping that maybe if I leave them empty long enough, I’ll finally get the chance to bulldoze what little is left after it’s all rotted away and grown over with weeds,
And the cracks in my body’s sidewalks will grow thorns too thick to walk through

My angels gave me fertilizer but I’ve been too busy using it on the community gardens,
What I would sacrifice to see everyone else grow

I am living the death of every empty sad warehouse in every town in every city in every country of my body, and I am scared that I won’t know how to rebuild once it all crumbles back into the grounds from which it all came

Instead, I’ll crawl the surface of my body, getting cuts and scrapes from everything that’s become broken, just like that two headed boy back in ‘98,
and I’ll sing my hallelujahs into the open wounds like my magic could possibly heal something that no longer has potential

But it’s all a beautiful kind of war,
Where the guns and anger unlearn dead and relearn life,
Where the bullets are poppyseeds,
And the whole battlefield is lit up with a happy kind of high,
A feel good kind of resolution,
And the blood shed on my body’s soil is like water in the stems of all of the flowers killed by everything that has collapsed and fallen in on them

And when the horses come running, when the bells come ringing, when the soldiers return home,
They will begin anew, and every warehouse in every town in every city in every country in my body will have lights in their windows for the first time in years