a dedication to the way you tore me to piecess

I can’t say loving you is easy.

I can’t say it is easy like it’s easy to miss the sun during the winter and it isn’t easy like loving the way leaves turn color in the fall.

Loving you is so hard –
but nothing, nothing, can compare to losing you.

When you left my life it felt like you branded every inch of my heart with a different memory and then blew it to pieces.

It felt like I had pieces of my obliterated heart just floating through my blood stream, and randomly, for no reason at all, some memory would make its way to my head and play behind my eyes like a movie screen.

I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to make it stop.

Those technicolor movie showings made my day when you left.

Every single day.

The worst part – the absolute worst part of it all, though, was when you had told me you wanted me back. When you had decided that suddenly my love was enough.

Well.

I dropped to my knees and stuck tape between my teeth and pieced every inch of my heart back together for you.

I shoved my heart back into your arms and asked with tears in my eyes – God, please, please, make it better.

I couldn’t bear to live my life through a movie that I didn’t know how to play the part for anymore.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

separated

we feel separated from everything.
like these bodies aren’t our own.
like these thoughts are what we would hear in the radio static.
like when we touch each other, our hands go right through.
like when you tell me you love me, we’re just watching a movie of ourselves.
it’s rehearsed scenes and actors and scripts.
like my body is here, but I’m six thousand miles away.
like nothing feels real anymore.

and the entire world knows this collapse.
the one where everything holds its breath.
where the trees and all their branches touch the ground for the first time.
where the ground shakes so hard it makes the rivers flood and the oceans break in half.
you know this collapse.
the one that happens underneath your skin.
the one you feel in your chest sometimes.
the one that feels like you’re unbecoming.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

six things you won’t tell your friends

1. You’d take him back. You’d take him back in a heartbeat, if it meant being his again.

2. The reason you didn’t sleep last night isn’t that you had to stay up doing homework till three in the morning. The reason is that you were going through old text conversations looking for a change. A shift, somewhere that you can identify as the point where he stopped loving you like before. Those kinds of things keep you up at night now.

3. You don’t need him anymore, but you want him. You want his smile in the morning and his laugh and his dumb jokes and his funny faces. You want it all because he means the world to you and every part of him is a part that you want to love.

4. You’re twenty-something, but you drink like you’ve lived a lifetime of pain. You drink because you’ve had your heart ripped out- and you have tried to replace his love with other things, but only alcohol can make your heart race the way he used to.

5. Coffee tastes bitter on your tongue but you read online somewhere that it makes you less hungry so now you like bitter. Bitter is the only thing you want. And in the back of your mind you know it isn’t healthy and it’s not right, but maybe if you get a little thinner you’ll be worth loving. Maybe if you tried a little harder at looking the right way and talking the right way rather than being loud and hungry, you’ll be enough. He’s made you question everything, and suddenly all you’ll wonder is why you weren’t worth loving.

6. You’d take him back. You’d take him back and you’d do anything to make him want you again, even when you know that he probably never wanted you in the first place.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

didn’t see it coming

She leaves –
and you’re never quite the same.
you have a thousand stories you want to tell, but she tears you apart so well, cause you already told her all the ways you’ve been broken before.
So she leaves, and you kiss another girl, a beautiful girl even, who is mysterious and laughs like an angel and gives you a funny look at 2 a.m waiting for you to finally kiss her and you do and, and,
you’re back, quietly, to any moment you can remember of kissing the girl who didn’t want to stay –
She leaves
and they tell you it takes time, that it’s a process, but you don’t fall asleep the same way, and you run till there’s blisters covering every part of your soles, and you drink till it all spins and you think – God
she left, she left, she left.
she keeps leaving.
over and over, every morning.
and you’re not sure you can forgive her for it anymore.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write

you could’ve sworn that goodbye wasn’t even a line in your story, but suddenly it’s filled up every page you were suppose to leave for the future.

The worst kind of good bye is the kind that you don’t expect.

The worst is when you don’t even consider it an option, because four months ago he was telling you that you were the love of his life and now the word forever isn’t even uttered from his lips. Four months ago he was looking at you like you put the sun in the sky and now he looks at you like he can’t wait for the sun to set and leave the skies over his head.

The worst kind of good bye is the kind that you dread. You feel it leaking into every crevice of your heart and you’ll try not to talk because you can hardly take a breath in, let alone beg him to stay while he’s stabbing wounds like “it’s over” and “I’m not gonna do this with you right now.” You’re holding in your tears and replacing them with anger and words with a lot more bark than bite like “fine, okay, leave, Jesus Christ I don’t even want you anymore.” And he’ll look at you all sad because you both know you’re lying, but God fuck if he’s going to leave then just rip off the fucking band aid don’t wait around to see if the wound will heal.

The worst kind of good bye is the kind that echoes through your body months later because he left his fingerprints on parts of your body that you couldn’t expect like the back of your eyelids or the spaces between your fingertips. The worst kind of good bye is the kind that enters like a bullet but crawls its way out like blood from a cut. You feel it everywhere and you let it haunt you because you’d rather picture him saying “good bye” a million times than not be able to see him at all.

The worst kind of good bye is the kind that he left you, because no matter what you do you can’t seem to press the right buttons to rewind or close your eyes hard enough to shove the words back into his mouth and replace it with the love you could’ve sworn he once felt.

– excerpt from a book I’ll never write