He specifies.
You know?
Like the feeling when you wake up to a rainy morning on your day off. How your neck curls into the pillow as you pull up your fluffy duvet and you feel a special safety, certain comfort.
His words are as exact.
Choosing every syllable carefully as if laying mosaic. I'm not always good at understanding the picture. I obsess about one tile that feels out of place until he asks me to step back, the precision allows a specific illusion, but it's so easy to get lost in the cannery yellow and aqua marine.
Out of context these variants of primary colors can lead me to so many different places and I often find myself in an entirely different scene, drifting down a stream of consciousness made of letters.
Sometimes he'll come with me on this journey, indulging my imagination. But these scenes of mine are more like water color, each brush stroke bleeding into the next.
And he is different.
He is pedantic.
He can obsess over finding just the right way to say something even when I understand, even when I'm there. And while I take an anxious breath allowing us both space to grow and stretch, I take comfort in the universe he creates.
I take comfort in the exactness of the words he strings together.
I take comfort in his pedantic way because he specifically says, "I love you."

In the Webster dictionary beauty is defined as:
"The quality of being physically attractive"
And it never specifies what attractive is...who gets to decide it
but...
The screens, the magazines, they all scream
In high definition their definition of "beauty"

Beauty is itty bitty waists and walking twigs
negative spaces between legs that subtract another's value
if the gap is not there
It is lipstick and pale pink blush on rearranged faces
like children playing dress up
or a giant game of make-believe we are made to believe
that something is wrong with the way we look
And we have been directed well
the cruel criticism oozing out of over-injected lips
typed out with freshly manicured tips
"she has weird *****" "you have a weird nose" "lay off the cookies"
we read off the scripts, taking turns playing the villain and the victim
and there are no heroes here
There are no standing ovations, no thunderous claps await

Is anyone really watching?
                                                  Does anyone really see?

With pain hardened eyes we glare
we compare compare compare
ourselves to the models, the barbie dolls, the flawless magazines
our friends, our sisters, strangers on the street
and in our rooms before the mirror
our reflection the bearer of bad news
"you are not the fairest of them all"

will we ever be?
So much trial for so much error
we are worn thin and even so
even so we are told to lose a few
And we run, endlessly
in the hopes that we may be worth something


If only we would realize that beauty is a noun, a word created by man
between beaten and become
If we win this race we will have beaten the monster society has become
and see
that we are all worth more than words                      
                                                                ­ **we are flying off the page

I wanted to apologize in advance for the heartache i left at your doorstep. Please appreciate the beautiful wrapping, for appearance and pretense, which are essentially the same, do take effort. I rang the doorbell twice, and dug the knife in deep. Not necessarily because I wanted to wound you, but mostly because I wanted understand your depths. I wanted to know how far i could sink in.

I forced my way into your thoughts. You didn't invite me in but once i reached the inside of your fascinating head i ran wild, leaving scars on your vulnerable brain as I pleased. I spray painted graffiti on the left brain, carved my initials into the right. I hoped that as the years pass by and the trees do their seasonal dance, you'd run into those scars and I'd force my way into your thoughts once again. Or at least that's what i had planned.

And I'm sorry for making you my voodoo doll. By hurting you i was hoping that i too would feel some sort of agony ,but i think that my heart's ice covering has made it numb to this kind of pain.

I was trying to undo your knots, so maybe mine would fall apart as well. I was hoping that we were two strings intertwined. As the strings separated I realized that they weren't nearly as beautiful, so I backed away pitifully. My knots were tighter than ever, and looking at yours hurt. I'm sorry I ruined your mess. It was all so intentional.

It was because I loved the way I looked in your eyes. They were a mirror I could finally bear to see myself in. But you have to understand that I didn't want to love myself. So i had to make it so i wasn't able to peer up at your irises anymore. Only at the ground as a mumbled my inadequate goodbyes.

I needed you to be a reason to write a love poem, but you turned into another apology, I'm sorry. I wish I would've loved you.

There were times when my heart beat fast. Hypersonic. Like it needed to pump blood through the tangles of veins for the both of us while we focused on one another. It wanted to keep us alive so that we could experience this for as long as possible.

I put you in my mouth. I felt you on my teeth. Then I chewed you up until I became sick of your flavor. Once sweet, the taste of you now nauseates me. This is me spitting you out. Whether bubble gum or boy, neither are meant to last forever. Have I punctured you yet? Is the ice building in your veins? I cannot help trying to hurt you, its an intuitive source of pleasure that can only come from the dark insides that bark through their muzzle.

I felt like a child again as I toyed with your emotions, but as always, games grow tiresome, and I wanted a new doll to run my fingers against. I wanted to create a new story.

I haven't ended it yet. We're in our telescope phase. I'm looking for reasons to leave and you're looking for reasons to make me stay. We both know the latter is much more difficult to decipher in the night sky. Yet we continue our search, destined for the inevitable, but pretending to be oblivious. Slaves to what must be, but patrons of what could be.

I was one of those girls who thought about death a lot and you were one of those boys with balloon lightness, which made you endlessly appealing. I grabbed on to you hoping that you would bring me up with you, but we could not defy the laws of physics set out for us. You could not bring me up, I could only weigh you down. So i set you free, and watched as you floated gracefully away, becoming smaller and smaller.The image is still clear, and the scar still stings when I think about how it felt to no longer be able to see you, and that the fault was all mine. Because I had an agenda for breaking hearts.

But don't pretend like you didnt love your puppeteer. You wanted to be controlled. you wanted something to hate. Because people want something to hate just as much as they want something to love. Because everything is the same. Once you realize the uniformness of the world, you realize why we wear our irises and we convince our brains that everything is, in fact, different. And we decide some things are to be loved and some things are to be hated. But what specifies these things from one another? What is the difference? A world where young children scream at the sight of a flower, and destroy it with their boots until they are sure it is dead? A world where a suitor gives a beautiful woman a bouquet of spiders to show his affection, and she blushes and says that they're beautiful. What is the difference between this world and ours?  Essentially, nothing. We have chosen to love one thing and hate the other and it is complete chance. So when you say you love me, I am offended.

And when you say you hate me, I smile.

suicidal thoughts are kind of like
having a really deep cough.
they’re the tingling sensation on
the bottom of your lungs each time you
start to inhale and if you try to breathe too deeply
they take over, they double you over,
filling up your lungs like water, sloshing,
and suddenly you’re drowning
as you fix your red lipstick.
you’re dressed for the **** and your
hit list stares you down through the mirror every day.
waste of space waste of time waste of money waste of good lines,
a ‘wanted’ ad that specifies ‘rather dead than alive’
because it’s less personal for it to be ****** than to call it suicide.
how sad is it that you peaked in middle school?
that the height of your social and emotional career was
the seventh grade, before all your friends
skipped town in eighth and then
freshman year you weren’t even an ex-friend but
manipulative and they labelled you
‘abusive.’ you find yourself having a
coughing fit every time you remember it,
watery lungs patted dry with paper towels
because yeah maybe you’re all friends again and
maybe they’ve apologized but do they really mean it,
or are you being a victim blamer,
you emotional abuser?
when you wake up at three in the morning
because the creatures in your nightmares are just barely
scarier than the skeletons in your closet,
think about everything you’ve ever done
in the past three years and manipulate it.
give yourself panic attacks over conversations
that have never happened,
riddle yourself with anxiety over what never was,
overexpose the photographs of your darkest memories
until they’re nothing but another lead weight in your stomach.
make yourself sick.
wake up with a throat sore from your
swallowed down screams
wake up with a tingle underneath your lungs
because you know that you’ll never be able to properly breathe,
that you’ll never get a full breath of air without that cough
swelling up and leaving you gasping

everyone has "those days".
nobody specifies exactly what they mean when they say it, but everyone always seems to know.
it is April third, there is nothing important to me about this particular day, except for the fact that it has been a bad one.
i feel as if everyone and everything i have ever held onto is slipping away, and as much as i try to tell myself to not loosen my grip, my fingers keep coming undone.
i am aware of all these things going on around me but i cant wrap my mind around any of it, i cant make myself care.

I prefer my sisters' children to call me Maasi,
Rather than aunt.
Aunty can be anybody,
Maasi specifies me,
As mother's  sister,
And only a maasi  can love like a mother.
28/2/2020

When alone, I thought
the crowd is wearing my face.
Silently judging,
safe in the knowledge of the tribe.
Transfixed by the multitude,
the lights flash on.

And as the daylight falls
the world is silent,
but for the sound of a singing bird
that comes from you.
The light that specifies the
face and the music,
swings as the deep abyss.