I only ever knew how to love with my chest open and my fists clenched
and when you were younger,
you were told that your heart was the shape and size of a fist
so you grew up using it like one.

So that night when I couldn’t stop thinking about
yellow jeeps
yellow motorcycles
and yellow packs of American Spirits
and how the man attached to them turned me into a natural disaster,
you pulled me into you

You showed me the most sacred parts of you
You made me feel beautiful even when I felt like nothing
You injected sun into my veins
My favorite planetarium was the one inside your head
I wanted to kiss the gravity out of you so you would stop throwing yourself down cliffs
Our lips touched and I tasted sunlight
You broke open my ribcage and planted a garden in me
I never knew what I was but broken but I loved what I was with you
I had never seen a brighter shade of sun.

And now, despite all that love
you look at me like I’m a crime scene.
Unable to sort your genuine fascination
from your pure distain

Ya know there’s something about being in love that’s good for your hands
but leaves a sour taste in your mouth
It makes you wonder if she was truly glitter
or just dust in the sunlight.

There was something about how you reeked of too much alcohol
and three AM promises that made me think twice
but I completely fell for you anyway
Your drunken slurs consisted of
“I love you’s”,
shaking hands,
wet, lingering kisses,
and the sound of touching teeth
because our passion would not allow us to love gracefully
But I can’t make you love me if you don’t.
All I can do is let you know that
without you
dawn doesn’t just break, it crumbles in two
and night doesn’t just fall, it jumps.

That night you say you felt like a plane crash
but I had never felt more hauntingly alive

Darling we wear tragedy so well

You taught me why hurricanes are named after people
and now I’m breaking into a thousand thunderstorms
and you refuse to even step outside
You ripped through my life recklessly like a tsunami
not caring how long it would take me to clean up the mess
and heartbreak you left trailing behind you

So now were just two earthquake girls
waiting for another disaster to come shake our world

-

But if this is what you want,
then I want you to have it
You deserve to be happy
you deserve everything beautiful that this world has to offer,
even if that’s not me anymore

So I hope he takes you on picnics
I hope he listens to your metronome heart
and is rendered speechless
I hope he looks at you like a
blind man seeing the sun for the first time
I hope he heals your fragile, breaking hands
I hope he gives you all that I could not.

If this is what you really want
if this is what makes you the happiest
then I can hold you no more than I can hold the setting sun

You've had the world turn against you.
In a heliocentric universe,
you'd think people would turn towards the sun
but instead you're doused in twilight.
As the one you love pours whiskey over the poems
you wrote for her.
As your friends shake your shoulders,
trying to wake you up
until they realize -

you can't dream anymore without thinking of her.

You could be a garden flower growing
on the forest floor
but instead you're trying to grow in her shadow.

But you are an artist,
a collector,
a lover,
a poet,
a person
and you cannot keep waiting in the shade for the sun to come.

A beam of light suspends the asymmetry of reality and divides darkness in perfect halves, starting from the door sill, spreading like a yarn ball unraveling, and stopping at the tip of my toes, just when the light runs out of thread.
I've been warned, I have. To touch it is to burn, and there's no beauty in scars.
And yet, I want to swallow it — I want to lean forward enough for my face to feel the warmth, to see gold and scarlet and the color of worship behind closed eyes — lean in another bit and soak in the feeling of fire fawning over my cheeks, of red sitting on my lips — and then, then I would open my mouth, ready to drown in the sun, but not without first promising I'll show you how to take pride in sharing scars, if only you too lean into the light.