i can still feel it — the ghostly echo of storm clouds it in my throat, now dry and emptied of the softest sighs. they all had fallen on my flower-bed skin, pristine as the petals that once were. or so i pretend. i can still feel it in my throat: the storm, looming. the calm drowning itself, and its haunting, beckoning call to which my feet slowly walk.

some days, it's just you and the uncharted depths of your own skin.

some days, you can bother with poems — some days, you can only drown.

I love you,
is this a mistake,
is this a myth,
hear me,
as I am announcing your place in my heart,
here, inside of me,
there is a different ocean expressing itself,
with good intentions,
with beauty,
and delicate breath and tenderness,
and quietly how you touch me with your hand,
your hand that does not,
deprive me of pleasure,
but gives me a sense of worth,
and what shall I give you now,
is it myself,
is it the mirror of my existence?

no i am not kind, i will pull your heart out of your chest — stain it with fleeting moments of softness before running it over with my train-wreck hands. i will pick you wild roses — they all die in my palms; maybe so will this love. i will kiss you and hold you, as we slow-dance our way to disaster; all we can do is sigh and crumble like greek ruins dying in a modern city. is it so bad, then, loving you with the kind of love that breaks and terrifies, and leaves you hurting and burning and wanting more? is this so bad, then, when it's the only way i've ever loved, and the only way i've ever known?

These fantasies always end with you staying. Here, my heart can afford to break itself, over and over for you. Here, I never had to let you go again. Here, my love for you always — always outweighs the heartbreak. My love, these fantasies — they always end with us staying.

I guess some things, I wish we had. Some things, I wish were ours. Some things, I wish were us.

i need a safe place to take off my skin and scoop out all the sorrows it carries. it peels. it burns, like a banished soul. but i have stopped saying my prayers — they just crumble into a ghostly sigh. i need a safe place — to take a peek at my demons without looking like one of them: a hurtful father. a forsaken son. a snake that sheds its memories and sins. i need a safe place to still my breathing — without my fingers pressed on a bruise and without my hands around neck. i need a safe place — a place away from all these thoughts, away from all these hurting. away from all of me.

You deserve someone who can look pain in the eye — an insignia of heartbreak with your name written all over it; your trembling sighs — like rust, lingering over their rosegold lips, and still, not forget that they love you.

The ocean is always deeper than what we can see. Maybe to hold a place for sorrows. No matter, bind me. Hold me down with a stone carved with the words to a funeral song. Sink me into the water until my skin resembles it — a deep, dark place for sorrows. A deep, dark place for a grave.

The ocean is always deeper than what naked eyes can see.

How much more breaking do I have to do until my heart numbs itself? I am sick of this routine — my chest sewing itself just to be ripped apart once more. I wish I can leave it be — an open wound for the flies. And yet, how many more wounds are there until there is no healing scar left to tear? I am sick of this routine. Tonight, I wish my heart would just tear itself into a handful of benumbed pieces. And tomorrow would stare at me — an aftermath of a storm. A heaving curiosity. A girl, lying in pieces and with no heart left to break.

In all ways, I have lined up my scars and written them insincere apologies; each word — a mockery and a transgression carelessly thrown in the night. I have allowed dread to settle deeply between my collar bones: an arrow buried between antlers until it unsettles and chokes. I have sewn sadness into my skin, like a dainty, silk sundress; worn it to church and to the funeral mass of a little girl I had to ****. She'll never know how much I mourned her, how on some nights, I still do. In all ways, I have looked at my skin, my fingers, and calves, and tailbone and saw a body that's never known gentleness or summertime souls or the gentle falling of the rain.

So after all of that, how, then, can I hold my heart now, without ever breaking it?


Tell me — how long can I hold my heart without ever breaking it?