Elijah 20 California

Look at you. Crying in a forgettable place. Trying to will the tears away so no one on the street questions you. Everything that you put hope into is failing.  You feel like there’s nothing for you to cling to anymore, like there’s nowhere else for you to go. 
But you have survived for years on the thought that things will get better. And look how far  you’ve come. You have survived all of the things that you thought would kill you.
 Even the hardest years have passed. Things changed, and you with them. You became new, tougher, 
and proved yourself resilient when you were
 not even convinced you could leave bed. Quiet the scared piece of you that doesn’t believe you can do it again.

I hate this little town. It’s so small, too small. Everything about it is small. The people here have small ideas. Small dreams. They all want to marry each other and live forever… I want to leave as soon as I can.

I know you don’t love me. I know you don’t think about what it would be like to trace your fingertips along the edge of my jaw and across my eyelids and on the inside of my knee. I know that I think about you as sunlight and that you don’t think about me at all. I know it’s a one-sided kind of love, the kind where you don’t taste acid on your tongue when you see someone’s hand around my own. I know you don’t love me. I know you don’t, but I can’t help the fact that I love you. I love you so much that I slur it in drunken hazes and think about it when I go to sleep. I wish I could press my love into every inch of your skin and bruise it into your heart so that it could beat to the sound of my love, but you’re too out of reach and I’m too hard to love. Please know that I love you more than I can begin to stand. Please let me know if one day you wake up and suddenly see me in a different way. I know you don’t feel me in your bones, but if you ripped my chest open all you’d find is your smile and your eyes and your laugh in the inseam of my heart. You’ll find the love that I possess, and the bleeding cracks from the love that you don’t.

It was like losing a vital organ. It was night after night of liquor-drenched dreams and waking up with a hangover that felt like rebirth each morning. It was your name still tattooed on the inside of my bottom lip; my tongue still grazes over it, memorizing the impression silently. It was the days where I heard your name mentioned on the street; the earth shook beneath me, threatening to crack apart and offer to swallow me whole. It was still going in your old room to smoke a cigarette out of the window, thinking that if I exhaled enough smoke I’d create a ghost resembling you. It was tirade after tantrum after meltdown and breakdown. It was learning that you were happy, and I was falling.