There’s a certain safety in lukewarm love
in the thoughts I never speak, you are the first to leave
we lay in bed with only our backs facing each other
is this how it’s supposed to feel?
I’d never admit it but I stopped missing you when you’re gone
maybe it’s time we admit dependency is not the same as intimacy

my heart has been my achilles’ heel more than a time or two
but I can’t help but be grateful that after everything, the world hasn’t been able to harden it
human nature is selfish motives
but empathy and I have become well acquainted
let my tombstone read “she was soft”
let me give love like I’ll never run out
let me be your resting place
and if you need the air in my lungs
or the organs in-between my bones I’ll give you those too
and if all I ever do is make others feel loved, that will be enough for me

I dream of you in shades of green.
Forgetting you is a different kind of growing pain.
The skin I’m in may be different than when you held it, but my bones are the same and they seem to still be aching for you

And while the better part of me is certain you were never meant to be more than a daydream, I can’t bare to tell myself it’s time to stop waiting for you.

Someday, when I’m older, my daydreams won’t be daydreams anymore.
The morning sun will dance across my bare skin in my third floor apartment.
Photos in film line my bedside table and life’s so sweet I hardly reach for my phone.
We dance on wooden floors to Van Morrison’s ‘tupelo honey’ and the sugar in my coffee falls short in comparison to the love we make.

shame makes it's way in-between my sheets
and you'd think by now I'd learnt how to tell it no
it's in the too much to drink when my words start to slip
in the tendency to stay when I should've been long gone
in the begging on my knees when I should've let them leave
she latches onto the hem of my frayed jeans
and reminds me of my past
she holds my stomach upside down
and stops all of my sleep

I will open my scabs and make them a garden before they have a chance to leave a scar on me.

-you don’t get to mark my body

I find remnants of the dreamer I used to be in-between the mundane
twelve years old and my eyes had seen more than most will in a lifetime
but I loved with every fiber of my being
I loved the cities I'd never been to and the life I hadn't lived
and all the things I knew I was meant for with the sweetest ignorance for how to get there
you can find me underneath all the evidence of my surviving
my heart just as thirsty as the little ******* her bedroom floor