Some days, the emptiness isn't even obvious. You're brushing your teeth or putting on your favorite denim jacket or adjusting your wristwatch and it's there, lurking and you don't mind at all. It almost feels normal. Right, even.

But there are days and nights — mostly nights, when it feels colossal, you can't ignore it. There are times when it stares back, it's impossible to pretend it's not there. There are times when it feels out of place and you just sort of wanna dig for what's dead inside, or claw through your ribcages, or crack your chest open — anything, just to get it out of you.

it had taken bones,
reshuffled and pounded to pieces
fingertips,
scorched
from molding cast irons,
worn, from unsewing and re-sewing heartbeats
and wrists,
white from scarring,
for me not to break
at the slightest touch.

today, i will wake up and think of you. the first thing will be about how your eyes had the color of all the storms that left this year. next will be your hair, in flaming red, as if to make up for all the colors your heart has been drained of for loving me. then, i will think of the way i wrote you poems amid writer’s block; every line, a compulsion, an obsession of i love you's rephrased. i will think of the feel of your skin, cold, but burning, like mercury fires crashing to the poles.

then, i will remember the chipped nails and back scratches and the heat of the whiskey, rushing from your mouth to mine. i will remember october and her rooftop letters we sealed with the skyline's silhouette. i will remember how they have become a foliage of words i refused to stop writing — and words you refused to read. i will remember how we wished to be paper cranes flung to the sun, how i have become icarus incarnate, falling, and crashing back to the earth. today, i will wake up and remember how loving you became my flight and my downfall. i will let the pain eat me up, rip my lungs, one flashback at a time. i will let the pain break me and break me and break me until there's nothing left to break.

and then one day, i will wake up darling, without sleeping next to make-believe alternate endings, without addressing you in apostrophes, and without the storms tailored to be metaphors for you. one day, i will wake up without wondering if you were ever hurt the way i was. i will wake up without thinking of you. i will wake up without the slightest traces of pain.

and then i will let you go.

I know a thing or two about couple stuff, darling, and neither of those fits in the space in your heart. The rest of the world basks in love and all its typical aesthetics, you know, the usual; holding hands while overcoming fears and jumping off buildings, and sitting at beach under the midnight sky, talking while meteors come to listen, and staying in small-town bookstores for hours and seeing metaphors from the steam coming off their favorite coffee brew.

But then, loving you isn't all about walking down a trail of roses under pretty sunset hues; it's not sharing the same wanderlust and flying to countryside Europe. Loving you is writing alternate endings to a tragic film, only to find it even more frustrating. Loving you is getting ****** in wormholes leading to chaotic, parallel realities. Loving you is crashing on brick walls, and dancing under the falling debris made to look like a summer rain. Loving you darling isn't like love at all.

But if you give me a chance, I'll kiss you in the subways and make poems out of it, as if the meeting of our lips creates milky ways and all other celestial bodies poets write about.

So let me love you, darling, despite all of this.

Let me love you, the way you deserve it.

Let me love you nonetheless

sometimes, we all wish for the world to just stop spinning for a while; that we remain sixteen or nineteen forever — just dreaming of painting the marmoris of the sea and seeing it displayed in a museum. just dreaming of browsing bookstores — each book sinking into your effleurage, until you see that cream-colored cover with your name on the spine. just dreaming of hearing a song from a stranger's car, and call it your own. just dreaming of creating stories out of piano keys. just dreaming of discovering a star.

at least, if the world stopped spinning today, a dream can remain as a dream forever. it will never be another thing we messed up. it will never be another dream we lost.

And how do you tell them you feel so empty without making it sound so sad?