I’m falling in love with living.
Im talking windows rolled down music blasting living.
I’m talking sunsets on the kayak living.
Hammocking in the backyard.
Listening to my neighbors kids laugh.
Cup of coffee on the back porch.
The same spot I sit every day living.

I’m talking crying myself to sleep living.
I’m talking not wanting to wake up living.
The pain of not being loved.
The tears I’m constantly holding back.
The feeling on holding on by a thread living.

I’m falling in love with all of it.
All at once.
I’m falling in love with my soul and my spirit.
I’m falling in love with the sunset.
I’m falling in love with the silence.
I’m falling in love with the process of falling in love.
I’m learning to love everything around me. Including myself.
It’s no easy task.
It’s dedicating everyday to the commitment of healing.

But...

I can’t quit yet.
There’s so much more left
to fall in love with.

You’re the first girl I ever felt in my
chest
Hammocking between my littlest ribs
With each swing
My bones creaked
And sang
A violin’s voice
You bumped my heart and made it beat
With every lazy kick of your foot

You’re the first girl
Who’s ever touched my hand
Crocheted your little fingers
In between mine, so
Where I end is where you start
And I feel like I could go on and on
Forever, attached to something this beautiful.

You’re the first girl that
made me fly
I strung my patchwork scarf
Across my back and flapped
My arms
And I had wool wings
And my teeth forced my lips apart and refused to let them meet again
I was laughing
I was soaring
I was Icarus.

You’re the first girl
Who’s made me cry
Big and ugly
Tire marks black
Down my cheeks
Hit and run me over with want
My lungs heave-hoing out oxygen
Like there’s just not enough in the
whole world to fill them

You’re the first girl
That made me feel
On top of the world
And underneath it
All in the same week.

-I’d keep the globe perched on my shoulders indefinitely if it made you smile

even beaten down and with broken wings I still bleed,
she still bleeds, my soul--
we have been at odds, and though I imagine us
as swordfighters on sunstricken bluffs in the countryside
she has never laid a hand on me,
only whispered half-recalled memories through tears,
of the hyacinths in chicago in april sprouting like fireworks overnight,
and how I had begged nature to turn my veins to roots so I could
feel it,

of late nights watching the high hat lights twinkle in the tiny apartment windows across the street, and how I had cried imagining the intersection of our lives that are each entire worlds on their own, colliding and orbiting like stars,

of fireflies in august in grade school, of hammocking in my yellow converse by the lake to people-watch, of concave train windows and sticky red seats, of my limerence-born tears darkening the tissue-paper-blue bathroom tile at home in connecticut, of wind of music of snow of rain, my God I have been

a prisoner

I have been snuffing out candles for years, sprinting around
cathedrals with blackened fingertips only for the flames to light
again

and I have grown tired of running

even if there is no love for me in this lifetime,
I can no longer stand the sight of her bloodied and curled up
against the walls of my mind,
with covered mouth and hands bound behind her back,
despite everything still seeping poetry