The sunlight winks from behind the umbrella of leaves and mangoes overhead. It tickles your cheekbones like the first, second, thirtieth good morning kiss. Your sandals are worn. A woven basket rests heavy on your hip, in your hands.

Your fingers, slender and worn by the earth, trace the contours of my face the way they search for meaning in a dictionary. Gravity. We inch closer. Have you always had a widow’s peak? Your hand finds it rightful place over my heart. I kiss you for the thirty-first time today. You taste of plantains and milk. You smell of sweat and the sun. My hand relishes in the traces of heat on your cheek.

One mango drops from your possession. Unripe, but soon to be opened up and worshipped as it is meant to be. Your fingers grasp the yellowing heart and press it against my lips. I rest against the trunk and sink my teeth into it. Liquid sunrise trickles down your wrist onto my blouse. The leaves create shadow puppets on the ground, the story of two young fools swaying in the shade of a tree.

i am looking at it now from afar — that certain kind of pain that would mirror mine; how immense it must be to go through it, and i can only imagine getting out. how immense the pain must be, how terrible, to wish for a kind of comfort only a certain, abrupt finality can bring. i am looking at it now from afar: skin as gray as mine and lately, the daybreak just brings in its rays more nights for us to swallow.

if it brings you any semblance of a cold comfort — the one you seek, i hope you know, i'll die in your place. i wish i can take it all away.

i stand in a pit of deep anxiety,
its shapeless form outweighs
all the sunsets i stored
inside my skin —
for keeping,
for the dark.
my arms outstretched towards its colors
are last bits of innocence
the only part untainted,
the only part that doesn't flinch —
at the voices,
the movements,
the arms clawing from below.

six feet deep —
maybe a higher number,
people cannot mourn what they cannot see.
soon these spare lights, these spare words, this spare comfort,
they will all dissolve into a shapeless, formless,
state of corruption;
i am a body, hazy in a jar
dumped at the back of an anthropology museum.
preserved, not rotting —
people do not mourn things that do not rot.
and mourning is all i do in a suspended time,
in a time that moves and doesn't wait.

i stand in a pit — on my feet
with twisted legs and washed-out skin.
i still, as though before a mirror
seeing this weight in full clarity —
it shows in my face, blank as a sheet of ***** ice
where i am buried in.
i still, in my pit, my feet, staring:

the rest of the world is shapeless as it moves past me,
formless as it walks by.

I’m in a limbo. A state of equivocality. Everything hangs in the air, but I try to chart my daily course as I normally do. Times are tough. Uncertain, too. Notwithstanding, I’ve taken more than I can chew.

I’m in too deep. I’m in a dark place.

You see, I was the golden child. A beacon of light. Envy was nothing new to me. I rarely espoused it, but was the oft object of it. Little Miss Perfect – always so put together. Always has her things together. I have Midas Touch, they say. I’m on a plane higher than my peers – on a dais atop the average twenty-two year-old. I can do no wrong. Only upwards from here.

So they say.

So I thought.

Today, my days bleed into one another. Sunday? Monday? What difference does a name make? I run on two hours of sleep and three thirty-minute naps a day. I don’t wake up to my 5 AM alarm. Nor sleep through it. It throttles to life as I hurriedly read tomorrow’s later’s assigned readings. I might get some sleep in. I rarely do. Finish your readings. Finish your work. Finish your classes. Eat in between.

Objectively, I’m in a good place. Roof over my head. Food on my plate. More importantly, safe. No 40-degree thermometers and sputum litter around. This makes me feel worse. Ungrateful *****. Little Miss Drama Queen. A million would **** to be in your shoes.

I’m in a limbo – my brain encased in a cloud of humdrum trepidation. Filled to the brim with silent thumps of dread. Thump. Thump. Thump. It’s not as if I did not try to do better to feel better. I do – I always do. My lists abound. #SelfCare’s always on top. Thump. Thump. Thump. They do little to quell my panic room of a mind.

Sometimes I wonder if this is how watercolor pigments feel. They are always so vivacious off of the manufacturing press. The reds are constantly vibrant and the blues are consistently resonant. But they fade when water comes into contact – even meshing into an ugly grey on the canvas when they touch the other diluted hues.

I’m in a limbo – no sense of past, present, and future. Everyday is a low frequency static hissing at my ears. Wonder child soddened by the somber. I’d build a rocket, they say. I’d own the world, they say.

All I am is tired nowadays.

my skin has always been mine to break. it is a crime scene i can never flee, and i have to live with the fact of being both the perpetrator and the victim. i am an inconspicuous shadow melting in a rustic kitchen, waiting to escape — waiting to be found, and this anguished aching has begun to chew on my fingertips, like a bleaching agent yet, some things always leave a trace. some things always leave a trace. some things always leave a trace. my hidden scars, my manic letters, striking in their blood-red words, my hair all chopped off like diseased dahlia stems. my fingerprints, like the sins of a roman governor washed in vain. my loudest angers. my quiet hurting.

some things always leave a trace. i wish i can dissassemble my body and carefully lay myself — all detached pieces, on a dinner table, and wipe myself with a washcloth. i wish i can wipe myself and lo, i am good as new. i wish i can wipe myself spotless. i wish i can wipe myself clean.

my vision blurs and refocuses around the sight of tamed blue fire. i am waiting for the low wheezing sound of the kettle as my mind wanders everywhere i wish it not to go. there was always tea ready for me at my therapist’s office; i think that’s where it started. we used to talk about my parents a lot, me and my old therapist. i remember telling her this one time: I love like my dad. I rage like my mom. she asked me to elaborate and i couldn’t give her much more to write down in her little notepad. i wish i’d said something about how sometimes i wish oranges could grow out of apple trees.

this is one of those days. every move i make has been pre-programmed. i grab a mug from the cabinet. i place it down on the counter. i am trying very hard not to cry. the teabag bobs to the surface so i stick my trembling finger in the water, i drown it until skin turns red and sore, and i’m thinking, You know, maybe I’m not so above it all (hurried whispers, clashing teeth, the hesitant theatre we make out of our long-starving hands). Maybe i need it, very badly. but then again, i’m not bad at being in love; it’s the being loved part that always gets me.

it's funny, isn't it? the paralyzing, nauseating threat of requited affection. funny if you’re the dissector and not the dissectee, that is. ****, but isn’t that what we all want? to be seen? for someone to finally notice everything we love about ourselves and love everything we hate about ourselves? would i not rather see myself through the reflection of your eyes than my own, unforgiving? sharp bathroom LEDs can’t ever beat half-dark and candlelit. see, i know that much. but such is life. some people will walk towards the light and some people will run from it.

from the bottom of my cup, the teabag stains clear water a dark, muddy brown.

sunset has me by the neck but not everything it lays on becomes beautiful and healed. all i do is curl my body into a small, tight space where the dusk begins and spreads. all i do is sigh my sorrows. all i do choke, and heave, and ache, at best — in full bright, bruising technicolors.

Evening jokes and candle dinners,
Potted flowers hammock hours.

I miss walks along the beach,
Holding hands and making plans.

I even miss arguments and hurt feelings,
Working things out, and relearning what love is all about.

I don’t miss you. This is true.
For you were wicked and cruel.

I don’t miss ***, or getting your text,
As each word manipulation, each night of passion a hoax.

I would rather like to live again,
And make plans and joke and spoil and spend,
I would rather cuddle and my life to end,

To never need love again,
Because I would rather live laugh live beside you,
My friend.