On Skype Get Hype

I can’t just pick up a pen and write you into existence. The most I can do is write poor metaphors about little dandelions with blue sky backgrounds and dreams and joy. My ink is tainted with blood- but it’s from my veins, not yours. My words are surged with my dreams, and I have to be careful what I spill. So right now, I can’t write about you. I can’t set my pen to work mapping out the palms of your hands when I myself can’t do that.  So instead, I’ll tell you what I know. You make me feel the way a runner does right before the last leg of the race. The feeling of being breathless but powerful, like you’re rooted into your body by more than just thoughts and intentions. When I’m with you, I know I can move the world with my footsteps. You make air sweeter, sunlight softer, my bones stronger. You make it easy to love life again.  You make anything and everything possible. Even a poem, written by a girl like me for a boy she is scared to love.

I’m not a poet. I don’t know how to be beautiful Or graceful Or emotional Or soft. I am a pale, rough canvas that’s collected too many knicks and dents to ever be used. I am the cracks in old wooden floorboards, the air when a needle runs out of record to scratch. I am cardboard that leaves dust on your hands and cracked glass windows that have forgotten what it means to open. I am plain, I am naked, I am simply me. And I am simply do not know how to tell you that you make me feel like so much more than that. You make me feel like all those things drunk poets write about. Like crisp blue mountains and misty waterfalls in the middle of jungles and…well, like art. Like someone who matters. But you deserve someone who can twirl galaxies on their fingertips. As much as I wish, I am not that. I’m not a poet. I don’t know how to be beautiful Or graceful Or emotional Or soft. I am just me. And I’m not enough to be loved by poem like you.

He held their love the way a child loves a fairytale: carefully, with fear it would never come true.

Next time, I promise to make you take a second glance. My nails will be perfectly trimmed, my waist thinner, my lips plumper, and my hands soft enough to hold. Next time, I promise to make you second guess. My eyes will hold rain instead thunder, my waist unscarred, my lips no longer chapped, and my hands steadier than your voice when you said you no longer loved me. Next time, I promise to be stronger. I will look into your hurricane eyes, anchor your waist to mine, wait until gravity dares you to taste my lips, and then two-handedly shove you away as hard as you had me.

The scariest thing in the world is not knowing if he loves you. It’s one thing when you look at him and wonder what his course hands would feel like on the nape of your neck, or how he would look at 3am when he is warm with sleep. When you have to imagine these things, it’s one type of scary- the kind that is exciting and tempting and brave. The kind you can find an answer to. But when you know how he kisses, how his hands feel on every part of you, what his laugh sounds like when he’s sad or mad or giddy or drunk, when you know it takes him 10 minutes to go to sleep every night and how his voice sounds like powdery gravel in the mornings… When you know these things, it’s not just scary anymore. Lying in bed with someone who you adore, while wondering if they love you is indescribable. It’s the emptiest, most consuming feeling of terror imaginable. There is nothing scarier than not knowing if you’re the only one still in love.

He kissed me as if he loved me. Question is if he ever did.

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

Please don’t notice all the little things I’ve memorized about you. It’s been over a year, yet I haven’t forgotten that you don’t care for wristwatches and love pretty looking fingernails. You wear Batman PJ bottoms to your 5am radio station shift, and Old Spice everywhere else. You only wear flypaper jeans because they make your butt look good, but sweatpants are always the correct answer. I know that your eyes turn gray when you’re upset, and you barely poke your tongue out from between your lips when you’re thinking. I’m sorry I haven’t forgotten. Please, for the love of God, don’t call me out on it.

Tell me again about how the world is intrinsically bad. Tell me how you kept every secret promised to you in the ears of the girl who your friends were right about. How your little brother broke your best friends heart and you couldn’t fix it in time. How the first time you drank that you cried so hard your nose bled (and how your parents found out). How when you think too hard your dreams turn to gray. How those scars on your ankles are from holding on more so than they are from falling down. Tell me how you fell in love with music only to learn that you can’t dance. Tell me again about your daydreams. Tell me what would happen to the unborn (especially bird eggs) in a zombie apocalypse. Why it’s better to live based on instinct instead of emotion. What the purpose of time is. What it feels like to kiss someone you’re in love with (and tell me about the risks you’d take for her). About your little sister what she will be like when she isn’t so little anymore. Tell me again why you think of people as colors. Tell me again about your childhood. Tell me about the look your sister gets when she is thinking, and how you sent yourself into time-out after you pushed your brother out of the tree in your backyard. How you got those burn marks on your hand from the Dry Ice Incident in the church parking lot. How your mom got mad when 6-year-old you said her dress made her look “elephantine,” and why your nickname was “Swiffer.” Tell me again about the first time you and I got in trouble together in that old BBQ place downtown. Now do me a favor and tell me again why the world is out to get you. Don’t get me wrong, your life has had moments that make the strongest people cringe. You’ve bled, sweat, tried and cried more than anyone I know, yet sadly you can’t find anything to learn from those drops of yourself you gave away. But love, look at everything you’ve just told me and tell me again why it’s not worth it. Tell me again why your parchment hands have forgotten what to hold onto. I’ll tell you again how much I love you. How those sweeping oceans you call eyes drown me every time. How you’re the only person I can look at and feel grounded. How you make my heart thump the front of my ribcage so powerfully I can’t sleep. How you’re my epic, my heartbreak, my adventure, my safe. How you make me believe it’s possible to breathe in stardust. How I treasured that mark you left on my collarbone because it was proof I was yours. I’ll tell you again how you’ll forever be my Rook to Knight. I fell in love with a boy who loves music and thinks in color, and even though you broke my heart I still can’t see the world as cruel because I know you exist in it. So tell me again, love. Tell me why you’re afraid.

No, I don’t think you get it. I’ve read a million poems that say “he was a melted sunset” or “he reminded me of the ocean on a windy day” or “I’ve never met a boy that could hold the stars like the sky before.” You say these things because the boy you love is beautiful to you, the way you think about them is beautiful, and so you try to use the beautiful sky as a way to describe him to the rest of us. You use the sunrise, the ocean, the starry sky because they are so obviously awe-inspiring that anyone listening will get the picture. We get it. He’s beautiful. But what you don’t understand is that someday, you’re going to meet a boy that is not “like” any of those things at all. He will BE those things. He is not a sunrise, because thick watercolor sunrises run through his veins like silk. He is not the blue-green waves crashing onto sand, or the flowers he gave you before your first kiss- his bones are made of old feather quills, his eyes will knock the air out of you better than any wave from a murky ocean ever will. He is not a starry skyline, oh honey, he can breathe in galaxies and exhale what makes your toes curl. Someday, there will be a boy who makes you realize how invaluable and precious your skin is just because it’s the only way you can feel the creases in his palms. He will fill your lungs with sweeter air than oxygen can ever muster, will charge your soul so powerfully that it will take no effort to make your heart beat. There will be things he makes you feel that you didn’t even know were possible. There will be a boy who will make you realize that you’ve never been in love before. And when he breaks your heart- though God I hope he doesn’t- it’s going to make parts of your scars squeeze in ways you didn’t know existed. But it won’t hurt the way you think. Cause get this: you will give him the consent to break your heart. You will know that you are not what makes him happy, and you’ll be okay with that. Trust me, it’ll hurt… No piano ballad will make you dance, and your mouth will taste of tingy steel. Nothing will seem truly wonderful anymore. You will claw for it and beg to see something that moves you, but nothing will ever compare to him. You will feel like your chest is a void for a while, but your heart will keep beating within it. Trust me, your heart will not forget to live: because he is worth living through a broken heart. That’s because that boy will be more than just beautiful. He will be the type of living poetry you didn’t know existed- the kind you can reach your hands into and hold onto. The kind with lips and warm whispers and terribly bad habits. The kind with callused hands to hold and cologned hoodies to be used as pillows, with dreams you are intoxicated with and a laugh that warms your soul. The kind that sticks with you years after you first read it, as if it were a tattoo on your heart. The kind that changes the way you read other poetry. No, you just don’t get it yet. Someday there will be a boy who will prove to you why. He will be the one that will show you that sunsets and oceans and starry skylines are beautiful, but nothing on this earth can come close to making you feel the way he does. He is not just beautiful, dear. He is so much more.

I don’t like drinking, but you make me wish alcohol could burn it’s course through every vein in my body.

“Hey there. Can you talk? I know you are the poster boy for the Unanswered Text Messages Union, but my heart is pulling itself apart and you’re the only one who can give me the answers I need right now. I’m feeling so heartsick. I’m so scared I’m in love with all the wrong reasons. I’m scared I’m going to wander into the days to come and still not change. I’m scared I’ll never remember how to write poetry again. Last time I tried, it was in a sadder state than I was. Right now I’m sitting in the hoodie that no longer smells like you with my heart beating so powerfully that it’s rocking my chest. I need everything to slow down for a bit. Hell, idk what I need. I just… I have so many things pulling at me right now that I can barely stand it, with no answers in sight. So if you could answer me… That’d be great. Thanks love.”

You think that you’re sailing a lone ship, Out to an island built from pressed lips and swirling clouds; Where the only pain that exists is your own Where life doesn’t get to scream so loud.