I can feel the fire
licking up my legs until they are charred,
black as my soul is believed to be.
Screams of the innocent echo in my ears.
This was meant to be my funeral pyre.

I **** myself awake
drenched in sweat, with a shriek of pain
catching like a lump in my throat.
Sheets bunched up against me like kindling
gathered to be lit beneath the stake.

I glance around the room
still feeling the eyes of my accusers
bearing into me, hatred blazing the
path of their need for destruction.
“WITCH!”
Many fates sealed with a single word.

Except I am still alive,
the blood of the crimeless flowing through my veins.
Those flames that condemn
spared no one but me, resurrected from the embers.
The Sole Witch of Salem, survived.

my lungs collapse upon themselves
as I listen to you speak,
causing my chest to squeeze
and my ribs to break.

White is the promise of purity revoked.

Red is the stain of lipstick on your fifth cup of coffee.

Orange is the succession of sunset to sunrise without an ounce of sleep.

The color yellow peeks through the blinds and dances across his skin.

Green is the color that burns your lungs until you're in a haze of numb.

Blue are the eyes that haunt your consciousness and tears that stream silently down.

Purple is the Galaxy pattern of hickies and bruises littering the skin he touched.

Black is the static you hear in the moments after, when you lay panting in his arms

...just before all the color fades again in his absence.

I was Vivacious, lively, wild.
A girl who was wild and free.
I was the romantic,  the addict.
the unhealthiest of combinations.

With you
I confused
Trust with Lust.

they say you wanted this from the first moment, and in the end you were deadly.

there was no middle ground
you would **** all on this earth,
setting the place on fire and
the water cannot save me
        if you cannot have me.

it is okay to be breakable,
to never rely on anything as indecisive as chance.
to be fake, be secretive
to stop giving it more attention than it needs.

Temptation lies ahead.
but romance is still alive, if you put forth the effort.

I need to learn to fall in love with a person- not just the idea of
falling
        in
     love.
I should know by now that I can be
deeply emotional or completely merciless,
there can be no in between.

I am a Mermaid,
I am a Phoenix ,
I will rise from the ashes of this broken love and break free of the tides that have all but drowned me over the years.

You have no power over me.

I am Vivacious, lively, wild.
A girl who is wild and free.
I AM the romantic, I will always be the addict.
the unhealthiest of combinations,

but also the most exciting.

Sometimes I forget for an instant
who we are.
In those moments where:
I hold your head in my lap and brush my hands through your hair.
You hold me captive against you under the freezing stream of water in the shower.
I watch the lights dance across your face as we drive through small towns late at night.
You stand behind me in the kitchen next to the stove, strewing kisses across my back,
my shoulders, my neck.

In those moments you are everything. You are mine.
And she doesn't exist.

my heart is made of scattered stars
glowing bright with their intent.

the constellation beautiful from afar
until the darkness comes.

Collapse is all there is.

the sweeping desolation.
shadows of once-brilliant celestial bodies
buried deep inside a shell with a
devastated soul.

my heart is made of scattered stars
that fold under pressure of
Love. Passion. Finality.
but when one star dies
the rest burn brighter
in the absence of its light.

Me and you, we fall like rain
              We spin, we crash, and we cascade.
You and I, we burn like flames
              We dance, entwine, a masquerade.

Pulling each other deep within the most sacred spaces
              We invade.

With a single look, one secret touch
             right before our lips just brush.

You are mine and I am lost in the feeling of your fingertips
tracing up and down my spine.

Once someone earns my love,
I can never take it back.
I will always remember the way the light reflects
in the blue of your eyes and I'll
always remember why I love you.

I will never forget the way your hands feel
tracing across my back in the shadows cast by moonlight
and I will never forget why I love you.

I will know the feel of your lips brushing mine
in the closest embrace we can manage and
I will know, always, why I love you.

but together we wear out,
     we fall apart,
           we pretend everything is fine.
that i'm just yours and you're only mine...

But in the end we burned up like stars
we fizzled out, faded away

But I will never forget that I love you.

when I tell him about you...
i'm not going to lie.
i'm not going to tell him
you were a good man that wanted him
but couldn't find a way.

that would be a lie.

when I tell him about you...
i'm going to do my best to be honest
without breaking his little heart
the way I once thought you broke mine.

what would be the point?

when I tell him about you...
i will tell him about all the times
you made me feel happy, but not that
every one of those moments were dripping in guilt.

i want him to know you were good once.

i'll tell him you were in the military
i'll tell him you were a brilliant story-teller
that built beautiful intricate worlds that twisted and turned
just like our lives did when we met.

even better, i'll tell him how we met
over a D&D table surrounded by people
and how much hurt we could've avoided had we left the
friendship in the fantasy world our characters thrived in...

maybe i'll leave the nerdy bits out though...

when i tell him about you i will make sure he knows your name, i'll make sure he knows enough to paint a picture in his mind and hold on to, not to idealize but just to know. you were good once. But i hope to God he never finds you. i hope he never feels the way i do about you, full of resentment and disdain because you chose elsewhere instead of here with our son.

My son.

He deserves more than you could ever have given him anyway.

I found solace in your darkness,
I took on your hurt and made it my own.
When you were drowning so was I,
and I always got your head up before mine.

I wore my heart out taking on
every end of the world, every crash and burn.
My love for you became my duty,
I became your wall to hide behind.

and now I crumble under the pressure,
        now I can't find my light.
I cannot drag you from the depths
even though my love has tried.

I hope someday you find a love
that makes you come alive.

My bones feel heavy and
my skin presses tight into my
        cold, purple sheets.
There is a knot tearing at the center of    
          my chest.
Arteries pump blood like fire to my heart and I fear it may combust.

       Burn me up like an incinerator,
flames engulf every part of who I am,
dragging everything around me
into the implosion, spitting out
      Ashes of what could've been.

When the time comes to say goodbye
        to the laughs and the love and our half-cocked dreams,
        to the feel of your lips and the played out scenes,
when we're going through the motions and
        we're running out of steam,
please know that I will miss you.

When the sound of your heartbeat is no longer
        the perfect soundtrack to fall asleep to
and I reach for something stronger to dull my senses
        and I long for something to feel real again after all this time,
please know that I will miss you.

When I stop expecting you to touch me
       in a way that doesn't just feel like lust,
       in a way that strikes me with the feeling
of being loved and not just craved
please know I will miss you.

When being your rock becomes the only thing I'm good at,
        the only thing that I feel you need me around for,
and it's the only reason I'm still here at all...
I will miss you.

When my heart can stand to break yours,
when I take my love away,
I will always miss you.

Whoever said that love was easy has never been in love.
They’ve never felt the yank in their gut when love says “can we talk?”
They’ve never felt the pull of someone else so deep in their soul -
that every breath taken without them is the worst kind of agony.
Never have they been so afraid of losing love,
because just one day without that person
would send their world crumbling into dust.
No, they have never been in love,
because if they had…
They’d never speak of the ease of love.
They have never held love,
Love has never held them.

Time stands still to me,
while everyone around simply moves on.
I gaze up at the stars longing for
whatever it is I do not know.
Planets inside universes inside galaxies,
unseen still by the human eye.
I want to drift alone in the blackness,
silence so deep not a soul can fathom.
Sound does not travel in space,
no one will ever hear me cry out.
Except they do not hear me now. Here,
where everyone is too busy with everything
they do, to even for a second ponder the mind
of the person that sits next to them every day
                     on the train.
Not even for a single second.

What happens to the words
that you neglect to speak?

Those words that sit on the tip of your tongue
but fall short of slipping out,

They just sit on your brain for years to come,
the proof  that you are weak.