The world hasn’t stopped spinning since you left and I am a compass that only ever points North, to you.
North, to your house.
North, to your eyes.
North, to the way my name sounds on your lips.
North, to rooftops.
North, to torn pages of writing.
North, to that one time i got blood all over your kitchen counter.
North, to fumbling hands and sweaty palms.
North, to empty drama rooms.
North, to sunsets.
North, to tangled bedsheets.
North, to the way half-lit bedrooms make your eyes look.
North, to your fingers in my hair.
North, to the night you stopped loving me.
North, to please don’t leave yet.
North, I can fix things I promise.
East, Jesus Christ don’t do this to me.
West, I’m trying to find you.
South, you’re somewhere between someone else’s lips now.
Month: August 2017
it still tastes like heartbreak
it isn’t what they show you in movies.
you don’t cry for weeks and wake up one day with yourself stitched back together.
some days it hurts more than others, some days, it doesn’t hurt at all.
some days it’s all the heavy hum of your heart, the weight of it, the breathlessness of it; how your hands grip things too tight, how everything you hold cracks at the corners.
other days it’s a broken rib; a bone popped out of place.
the makeshift empty of it; the nagging ache of it.
some days it’s nausea; all spinning and bathroom stalls and mirror reflections and neon lights and the sound of hollow.
most days you wake up with the stitches tearing; with fresh blood and all the hurt.
– excerpt from a book I’ll never write
some things are better left alone
This is how you know this fear:
sharp-tongued, red-eyed, clench-fisted, and crashing into your bones like an avalanche.
a voice like cat-calls at midnight, and all the names you scrubbed off your ankles after you walked the street alone.
sometimes he looks a lot like your neighbor when he’s angry, holding his fingers around the hem of his daughter’s shirt after she spends a night out.
sometimes he looks a lot like the boy who kisses you in the bathroom stalls of the soccer field, leaves you tasting blood, and never takes you home to meet his mother.
you are the blood on his hands and he is the saint who washes you out before he shakes his father’s hand.
you, a wild rabbit, and he a loaded gun; stuttered-breaths and bullet holes and the thrill of the chase.
you are asking to be hunted down, the words ‘baby girl’ and ‘hot stuff’ inked into you like name tags.
the pepper spray in your back pocket and keys digging into your palms.
you know this fear like you know apologies for your body and men who were all hungry-mouthed and strong-gripped when you were their handlebars.
-excerpt from a book I’ll never write
it never made it hurt any less, either.
You know the pain is going to hit sooner or later.
It’s that moment before a car crash when the wheels swerve and everything turns into a blur.
You know you’re going to crash, but all you do is hope the airbag doesn’t forget to inflate.
But it does; and suddenly your head goes through the broken glass windshield and everything is pitch-black.
That’s what it felt like to lose you.
It was that moment of impact on repeat.
It was tires screeching and heads going through windshields and so much black.
It was watching the car sidetrack a hundred times over and still not being able to stop it.
It was that moment of awareness, when you know you’ve lost control, but the car doesn’t go any slower.
– excerpt from a book I’ll never write
remember
remember Manhattans and crowded bars, smoke clutching your hair like a backbone.
remember loud music, and louder laughs, and drunk people bumping into your side, but all you can really feel are her eyes on you.
remember cold air that tastes like ash and old friends that look like ghosts.
remember the way she holds cigarettes in between teeth like she is about to bite into it.
remember sweaty palms and eyes that look dead, like this isn’t her third glass.
like this isn’t her second chance at breaking your heart.
remember nights when she is almost yours, but not quite.
when she is still in love with you, but not quite.
when she is hurricanes and thunderstorms and you are leaves holding onto dead trees.
remember, because you are holding onto her with bloody hands and torn skin, trying to pull her back into your arms.
remember, because you know she will not be brave enough to hold on too.
– excerpt from a book i’ll never write
REASONS YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LEAVE ME AND NEVER COME BACK:
i. i am wild ivy and you are a wooden house with broken window panes and walls too high to climb. you will let me in and i will wrap myself so tight around your bones trying to keep you together, but you will get tired of feeling me there every time you breathe.
ii. i am the songs you’ve learned to hear between uneasy breaths when i would tell you i loved you, but i will turn into slurred words and ripped chords and you will finally realize that we’ve always been an off-tune melody.
iii. i am the aftermath of a storm clutching to your fingertips when you drag your hands along my skin like you are triggering a natural disaster and you will find it hard to live with dust and debris gathering mountains under your fingernails.
iv. i am gracelessly placed kisses that will turn into gusts of wind against your lips and you will never teach your mouth to embrace tornadoes and i guess that’s why you took off whenever it started to rain.
the stages of losing her
One.
You lost her weeks before you actually broke up with her. You lost her when your eyes met someone else’s and you decided to venture a bit too far into their smile to where you couldn’t get back to her. You left her between the exchanged hellos, but you lost her when she realised she never really knew what love was with you. You felt it like a bullet in the back that knocked the breath out of you, but somehow part of you tried to breathe through your punctured lungs until you heard the words coming out of her mouth for the last time. You lost her weeks before you actually broke up with her.
Two.
Three weeks into your “relationship” you realised she would probably overuse the words ‘I love you’ like they were a mantra burned into her thoughts. She’d spill them over goodbyes that smelled like coffee and summer days that are too hot, and you’ll feel the words slip from her mouth and suspend into the air like all she’s trying to do is convince herself that she was in love with you.
Three.
You could have sworn her lips were sunshine on the coldest day of the year, but now you’re left with the aftermath of burns splattered along your arms and neck where she left empty kisses, and no amount of cold showers will stop your skin from peeling right off your bones. Don’t fight it. Don’t try to tear at the sunburnt flesh hanging from your body as if it’s the only part of her you still have. I read somewhere that skin cells need thirty-five days to replace themselves, and one day you’ll be left with a whole new body she’s never touched and hands she’s never held and you won’t feel her crawling under your skin anymore.
Four.
You can’t listen to your favorite songs anymore because you taste her name in every word she used to sing and before you know it you’re choking on bitter promises. Your tongue feels like acid in your mouth and it kicks off an all too familiar gag reflex at the back of your throat and you’ll need to hold your knees against your chest to stop yourself from throwing up. You’ll fall asleep that way and wake up with nausea twisting hurricanes in your stomach. But you’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.
Five.
You’ll try to reread everything she’s written about you and you wonder if she had laced it all together with strings of vacant words. You’ll lose yourself between every promise she’d scribbled down in her notebook like the lies took a part of you and threw it across your bedroom; a glass bottle shattered against a brick wall. Let her break your heart into a million pieces, but please don’t let her take the pieces of you away with her. Wait a few days and pick your pieces off the floor again. Wait a few more weeks and put yourself together. It’ll sting like hell but the stitches will fade away and one day you’ll run your fingers over your body and feel whole again.
Six.
That first night the sky lit up when we kissed, you made me promise to never write our break up poem, and I think that’s oddly fitting because somehow I’ve lost all my words somewhere between your lips.
– excerpt from a book I’ll never write
is it love if it doesn’t make you cry?
when I talk about falling in love, my mother goes quiet.
she tells me that loving shouldn’t be synonymous with falling.
she tells me to walk with love, not fall into it.
that love shouldn’t hurt.
that you shouldn’t have to cut off your wings to land in it.
oh but mother, how can one love without hurting?
without peeling my skin away to show all the fragile lurking below?
we’ve been taught that love means falling off rooftops for them and throwing yourself in front of trains for them. we’ve been taught that love feels like your lungs when the air gets knocked out of them, or your eyes when they sting.
when I was five they taught me that a boy who hurts you probably likes you.
I believed them.
I believed that love is when he trips you on playgrounds and tugs at your hair in class.
the first time I really loved, it felt too much like falling and too little like learning to fly.
it felt like plucking the wings from my own back.
it felt like being pushed from a cliff one thousand times over.
every love since then had been disappointment.
the feeling before a car crashes.
the brakes that hit so hard you slam your head against the windshield.
every love since then had been so much drowning, trying to breathe when you know you shouldn’t.
when a love didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel real.
if it didn’t hurt, it left me with so much empty; so much numb.
– excerpt from a book I’ll never write
you are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy
Dear body,
when she leaves you heaving sharp air into your lungs on the cold bathroom floor in the late hours of the night, please promise to pick yourself up again and learn to breathe, you are worth it.
when she colors your skin with blue bruises and red scars that light you up like a pastel painting, promise to wash yourself off with warm water and look at your skin, you are beautiful.
when she fills you with emptiness and fattens you with self loathing, allow your lips to savor love once more and refuse to surrender to the hunger clouding your mind, you are complete.
– excerpt from a book I’ll never write
an intolerable tenderness
My darling,
I’m sorry if you hear echoes of your mother’s words like tsunamis in your ears when you hold my hand. I’m sorry if you see her face staring back at you through the reflections of my eyes when I tell you I love you, and I’m sorry if you hug me too tight in hopes that everything she’d ever made you feel about yourself would seep right out of your fingertips and put me back together.
But darling, I will not apologize for holding your hand in mine like I am holding your beating heart in place, and I will not apologize for telling you I love you and staring so far into your eyes I could see the universe of your mind, and I will not apologize for wrapping my arms around you like you are my shelter.
Because you are.
And I love you.
Terrible, Thanks for Asking. 