There are too many things I regret telling you, darling. I regret telling you about how when I was little I nearly died in the accident that totaled my parents' Jetta. I regret mentioning that I felt like your Halloween costume was more important to you than I was. I regret that you let me convince you to help you clean your ******* room so I could feel important. I regret every tear I've made you shed and your pain is carved into my brittle bones so I know just how much I've hurt you. Honestly, I've started to realize how much of a miracle it is that you haven't changed your mind about loving a broken and battered shell of a human being wearing a smiling mask that comes off so slowly it peels away what's left of my pale, flaking skin. I'm surprised you're still interested in my thinning body and tattered soul. My name falling from your lips in ecstasy still sounds so foreign, like hearing a language you never even knew existed. You look at me like I hang the moon in your night sky, making me feel unworthy of the way you treat me, not like a broken toy but rather an ancient heirloom to be treasured and mended. I find myself tossing and turning at night wondering and worrying and whittling away at the fragile self confidence I build when I'm with you and I ******* regret. I regret not opening up and I regret the indisputable fact you could do so much better than me. There are still so many things I regret and letting you read this is one of them but these are all things you need to know and my heart is still in pieces beneath our feet. Yes, there will always be things I regret, but loving you will never be one of them.

Mom is sweet,
only likes candles that
smell good enough
to cause cavities.
I make sure to get her one
every year.
Become supplier when
her warm vanilla sugar habit
burns down the last wick.
She says it makes the house
smell home.
Turns bitter taste of argument
into something she can swallow,
wants to be able to inhale love.
Says that when candle smoke
feels more like a lover's arms
than your actual lover's arms
there's something about her that
burns out too.

When warm vanilla sugar//mom
cries
she melts.
Divorce making the cavities
in her mouth rot
faster than she can burn out
this flame. Her bedroom
the wick and my father spitting lighter fluid
while swearing he loves her.
I'm sure he does
but this wildfire of a marriage
cannot be contained in this house.
Needs to branch out,
call in reinforcements.
My policeman of a father
was never a trained fireman,
can only call in a blaze when he sees it.
So I stood by and watched while
their marriage burned
but never kept the house warm.

Now I cannot light a candle
without feeling loss. The memory
of my parents slow dancing
at my aunt's wedding
sits shot gun in my car.
It's the four lighters I carry
around with me at once.
It smells like ash.
But my mom says she'll buy
me a candle for christmas,
one that smells like family dinners,
one that smells like coming home
to both parents.
She says I can burn it in my new bedroom,
says we don't have to live in
the memory of a house,
can live in the parts of us
that go home for the holidays.
The parts that smell like
warm vanilla sugar,
a lover's arms,
a wedding's slow dance.
And maybe one day
every day can smell like that
too.