There are days when the sky is a vibrant blue and the sun expels its warmth
upon my shoulders,
then there are days when the sky is filled
with nothing but a melancholy grey,
and I embody nothing but the rain.

On those days,
I may have to drink an extra cup of coffee to pull myself out of bed and face the slight suffocation the real world places upon me.

On those days,
I may not have much of an appetite and will push away any thought of food, even though I know I should eat.

On those days,
my eyes may become heavy, filled with just as much water as the storm clouds lingering up above me.

Some days I wake up
feeling as radiant as the sun,
and some days I wake up feeling as
dreary as the rain.

But at least I always make sure to
wake up and be something.

I thought I could shove you
to the back of my closet,
make you another skeleton with cracked
bones that were never able to mend.
But when it was midnight and my room
was as dark as the moon ridden sky,
I could still hear your blood pumping,
and the sound of your fingernails
clawing at the door searching
for the missing piece of your heart.

I thought I could ignore it,
and silence your scent that somehow
still lingered on my skin.
Until I realized no perfume could
mask the shadow you had casted on me.
So I unbox your pieces
and step back into my old life,
realizing maybe we weren’t dead after all.
The sensation of your lips touching my skin
once again was the warmest my iron lacking body had felt since the day I left.

It’s midnight again,
but I’m back in your room.
It’s as dark as the moon ridden sky,
yet there’s starlight drizzling over your face.
All this time I refused to believe that we were made of the same stardust,
until I finally saw our constellation
finding its way back together.

Vulnerability is a funny thing. Everyday people urge us to be authentic- with ourselves, our peers, our passions. Yet when we cut ourselves open for the world to see, they run from us as if we are violent rip currents waiting to take them under. When in reality we are nothing but individual tide pools sometimes puddled into something so much bigger than what others want to openly accept.

But I refuse to not live a life of authenticity. So many souls become comfortable with safety, causing them to become deeply implanted in solely just the soil in which they have resided their entire time of growing. Genuine love for something other than yourself has become nothing but a fossil of a feeling. Streams of emotions have dissipated and turned into desert lands.

As for me, I took the time to disappear within myself. I discovered my flatlands and made them curved. Those rip currents everyone always runs from are big, but so am I. A vulnerable soul may be looked at as someone made up of only dainty fallen petals, but the truth is they're looking past someone with roots dug deeper than sunken teeth into bitten skin.

What's authentic to those who shelter themselves like boarded windows in the midst of a storm might as well be forgery to me. I urge you to not be afraid to put your innermost self into another pair of shaky hands. To not hesitate to whisper your deepest ridden thoughts into caverns of a mind that's not your own. To not second guess putting you're ragged edged heart into someone else's hollow chest.

Vulnerability and authenticity meet at an intersection that you must come to terms with stopping at. I hope to see you there.

You asked,
what’s the point anymore?
Of us, of everything we’ve been through,
and in that I found I was so tired of being
inside of goodbyes.

I’ve been driving in circles searching for brighter days, when everything that embodies them has only been 2 miles away. I’ve spent so much time hiding under my own eyelids that I forgot my waking moments aren’t supposed to solely consist of whiskey moonlit nights. I tried so hard to block out the white noise, but I couldn’t help but hear your voice, whispering in the sway of the sprouted flowers emerging in the cracks of sidewalks. I became complacent with rainy days, but still couldn’t help but see your face in the subtle beams that break through greyscale skies.

You asked,
what’s the point anymore?
And I realized the point is us,
nothing but a linear pair.
And as much as we try,
our lines can’t help but intersect.

You left me with open ended letters
and hand written promises.
Your words were always too fine,
too far and few between.
You were a genre of your own kind.
An enigma of words, always
tattered and smeared.
Coffee rings and cigarette ash
seem to ruin every last page of a chapter.
Things got ****** and I could no longer
read you, my eyes unable to pick up what
was left to discover between the lines.
Hard cover, when I was always paperback,
bending in any way you wanted me to.
I tried so hard to keep you with me,
crumpled up in my front pocket,
but the jaggedness of your ripped out edges
did nothing but draw blood.
I’m so tired of getting papercuts.
I’m running out of bandaids.

I can feel rivers running through me, all leading back to you. Your fingertips coming and going like waves. They say you can make a home out of anyone, but if that were true then I would’ve made my place in someone new a long time ago. I would’ve put my heart into someone else’s hands, letting them mold it into whatever they wanted. I would’ve broken down the walls you forced me to build. I would’ve cleaned up the mess you created, making myself seem pristine, when in reality I’m a hurricane nobody wants to get in the path of. But I realized, things that come back to you are things that never truly left. So here we are, standing outside of my car with our feet glued to the gravel, your overgrown hair loosely moving with the wind. The streetlights are glowing on our skin, and there’s stars trapped in the corners of your hazel eyes. I realize I’m okay with drowning in these rivers, as long as they always lead back to you.