When I met you, I was merely an average girl who used her pen to scribble the words that couldn't ever leave her lips.
I hid behind slanted handwriting and poorly structured sentences, rusty metaphors and my pathetic namelessness. I could paint snow-frosted trees and lakes that reflected and distorted your face without even touching a single paintbrush, and make people's hearts feel as alive as if they were ten.
But you didn't fall in love with me, not in the sense I wanted you to.

And so began my obsession with you. I hated you and wrote about how your eyes were bloodshot and how your smile was slanted and how you made my heart physically hurt. I loved you and wrote about your body perfectly slotting into mine. I made you my muse, and created dozens of metaphors and made up various words; to try to describe how you made me scared and nervous and warm and fuzzy.
I hated how I loved you and loved how I  couldn't hate you.

Months later, I'm still smitten over you, unable to get over your sad smiles and witty comments, so I beg you, just let me have a chance to show you how together we could be king and queen of the endless words I can create with my pen, how we could wear upside down crowns and dance along to the beat of my half-broken heart.

You can fix broken bones
and mend glass souvenirs
you bought in various countries;
you can fix broken nails
and patch holes in your clothing;
you can rekindle feelings
and put two broken lovers
back together

but no matter how hard
you try
and no matter
how many plasters
or painkillers
you may have,
you will never, ever,
be capable of fixing a person.

there was once a girl who had a heart made of stone
you might think this is tragic and most unfortunate
but this girl was intoxicated by the smell of a certain boy's cologne

despite the empty promises she had made to herself
about not ever falling in love or anything of the sort
she decided to take into account all the tales of love that sat atop her bookshelf

so she followed the boy with the striking green eyes
and the strong scent of cologne
and to her paranoid and lonely ways she said many goodbyes

she fell desperately and hopelessly in love;
such love that made her insides fuzzy and warm
her heart of stone becoming lighter and lighter, fluttering not much differently than a dove

but as it turns out having a heart of stone is far better than having no heart at all
although she found this out the hard way;
for the boy she had changed her ways for, had a heart so incredibly small.

My dear, if you were to cut me open,
to tear away my measly skin,
you would not find
the contents of an ordinary human being.
You would not find veins
or internal organs,
especially not a human heart.

Instead, you would find a battlefield, with freshly made bomb craters
and you would find discarded bullets,
fashioned from spiteful words,
that were perhaps destined for use on my worst enemies
but were instead aimed at myself.

You would find the remains of a daisy field
with the left over petals
looking vaguely like feathers
that fell from doves
or perhaps even angels.

You would find memories of a tiny village
once colourful and lively
but swept away by multiple hurricanes,
that took all happiness and innocence along with them.

Blood would not pour
from my lifeless body,
but dark cigarette smoke would seep from the wounds,
and if you closely investigated,
you would find that the fumes were made up of
microscopic black moths
that had all my lies and promises
carefully written all over their feeble wings

For I am not a human being, but simply a worn out shell of one.

We go through life
ticking off a metaphorical
list of firsts;
first words
first steps
first school
first friends
first love
first kiss
first heartbreak

so on and we go
ticking off item after item
until all our firsts
become our lasts.

It's ironic how I write about love
when the only love I have experienced
was when I was a young girl
and some of my parent's furniture was older
than myself

I don't know if I am allowed to call it love
because at the time I wasn't so obsessed
with thinking about his smile and the palette of colours
within his eyes
instead I focused only on perfect plastic dolls
and disguising the crumbs that fell
onto my dress when I stole from the cookie jar

It was a love so selfish that when he kissed another girl's cheek
I turned scarlet with anger
and sabotaged the sculptures she had created
out of blue and green plastic blocks

but before the sculpture even hit the carpeted floor
I was already over the so-called heartbreak,
with my eye on another little boy
who laughed at what I had just accomplished.

Nobody has ever been infatuated by me since that day
and my love has never been anything but unrequited
and unwanted
and frustrating
and yet I continue to fabricate feelings of love out of thin air,
writing them down on crumpled sheets of paper
and imagining what it would feel like
if any of the things I wrote about
ever came
true.