You know, after meeting her it’s easy to understand why hurricanes are named after people, although I can’t say for certain if they name storms subsequently in her honor or out of pure lust. I really want to know what’s going on inside of her head. I can’t seem to stop thinking about her eyes. All storms have eyes, true, but hers seem to be calmer than the rest. I mean - so there she is, right? - the first time you see her, she doesn't notice you, yet you can’t help but understand. The way she reads books is like she’s memorizing scripture. She carries a sense of reverence with her I’ve only experienced when someone talks about God and I’ve been thinking about her eyes and cathedrals. I’ve been thinking about what it might be like to be her favorite hoodie. Her smile, whether it’s genuine or not, tears me in two and I am ******* afraid of her with lipstick on. I’m afraid that if I tell her I want to kiss her she will think I mean kiss her and not “kiss her”. I wonder if anyone’s ever tried touching her soul. Marble statues know her name, and not for the reasons you’d expect. I’m thinking about her eyes again. I want to know what’s going through her mind when I look at her and see her eyes. After meeting her, it’s easy to understand why my mom warned me about addictions. The kind of addictions where the thought of bare skin and bed sheets leaves you in a cold sweat. The innocent idea of her lips has you craving a feeling that doesn’t exist. Where you’d give every poem you had for just a drop of her eyes. After her, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at the stars the same way without wondering how their shine always falls short of reaching the space between her skin and mine. She’s a work of art cast in skin and bone. Eyes. She’s the calm during the storm. I once read somewhere that the girls you read about in books don't exist, but as I watch the way she turns pages like shes being reborn, or the way she walks in late to class sometimes and the whole world seems to notice as the gravity of the room shifts all its attention to her, it’s hard to believe she wasn’t written perfectly to play her part. The way she baptized the asphalt with my car left me reborn at the other end of the steering wheel. You know, she once told me, “It’s crazy to me to think about how most people don't have these problems.” And all I could think about was how to a blank canvas, paint must seem like scars, yet to the artist it’s a release. Eyes, but this time they’re closed. The whole storm, passing around us in a constant story line at 100 miles per hour, and here she is, just as lost as everyone else. Sometimes I fear that my hands might break her, but then I remember that a storm lives beneath her skin and end up thinking about her eyes.

He hurts people.
Not by choice, no, but by design.

He’s like a kitchen knife or a razor.
Hurting people is not what he was made for,
But looking at the way they work,
You’d never be able to tell that.

Hurting people, for example, is not what a razor was made to do,
But it’s very good at it.
And a kitchen knife wasn't made to ****,
But with a blade like that,
Few things are more effective.

He wasn’t made to hurt people,
But when his mind interprets every breath you take as scripture,
And the way he finds earthquakes in your heart beat,
And how when even on the coldest nights
He manages to find warmth in the way your eyes glow like the moon,
How he wonders what it’s like to be your favorite hoodie,
Or how long your smell will linger after you’ve left,
How by nature his thoughts compare fire to your touch,
And ice to your lips,
When you ask him how his day was and he genuinely can’t remember
Because the sound of your voice was the first thing he felt all day,
You’d never be able to tell.

Yes, He will admit it.
He has edges sharper than razors,
And a mind that will cut you into a million fall leaves of every shade of fire.
But he wasn’t made to hurt people.
He just does by design.

It’s what we all strive to be, the idea of being enough. Maybe not forever, but just for a moment. A moment long enough to make everything else seem to fade, but this too will pass and you’ll find yourself wondering why you weren't enough. What flaw made them leave?

You couldn't have changed what happened, and that’s what eats at you, having to live with someone else's choices. She left, he killed himself, we grew apart, they laughed at your pain, and you stood there helplessly watching it happen because that’s all you could do.

She made me feel the way a sunset colors the sky. Her flowing hair rolled over her shoulder blades like ocean waves cresting on the sandy shores of some forgotten paradise. The way she walked -or rather- the way she carried herself, was as if her every movement was conducted by the the wind itself. She was poetry and I was helpless to become a poet in her wake. But she was cold, Her heart was bone dry like a winter night and her motives made alcohol turn to ice. The curve of her hips perfectly replicated a trigger and I could think of no sweeter death than to have one of her bullets be that last thing to go through my mind. It was then I realized how a man could play Russian roulette. The way her lips pursed every time she saw me made me understand why men went to war. Her hands fit the curve of my neck like a noose and there was nothing I wanted to do but hang. Looking at her was staring at the sun and it wasn't until I met her that I understood what my mother meant when she told me not to touch a hot stove, because things that glow often burn us. Yet just like the hot stove, I failed to learn this until I tried.

And so he broke,
Just as the clouds break.
Revealing everything that had built up Inside for the whole world to see.
The cracking of honest thunder, crying.
The apologetic downpour of rain, tears.
But if lightning strikes and no one's around to hear it, did he still break?

He broke.