❕

I think about you when I have seafood. How whatever is on my plate loved the ocean so much that, even when dead, it kept the very salt of the ocean embedded in its own crevices to remember the feeling of floating, of freedom. Yes, I am sure the salt against bare and raw skin stings but I have always loved to push my bruises. I think about how I keep our memories alive against their own will. They want to die, they are ready to die, but I have them on life support. Am I selfish for making the blood flow on a braindead love? I think about how a pearl was just a piece of sand that stuck in the tongue of an oyster. I remember every time we kissed how your tongue made me feel smoother and shinier and like I had worth. When I was with you, I was no longer a grain on the beach, I was the object of everyone’s lust.

Do you remember like I remember? Does your body ache like mine does? Where mine does? Did you keep the presents I spent weeks carefully choosing? Are they next to the “Do Not Enter” sign hanging over your heart? Do you hold on tight to the memories, forgetting that they are mine too?

I swallow words and phrases much easier than I ever could my pride, I swallow the jagged edges of “I’m sorry"s, tasting like iron and a punch in my gut rather than let them blossom in your stomach, I tell myself I could not bare the thought of you cleaning weeds. I swallow the moonlight paths of “I love you"s, tasting like too much raw honey eaten all at once and my lungs are on fire, but I will still pretend I am fireproof. I swallow the rain pelted gardens of “let’s keep trying” because all I taste is dirt and flowers, too many sunshine kissed Summers spent before they were even here, I will teach you how to take your time and no more of mine.

There are cobwebs littering the corridors of my heart from all the times your love forgot to visit while your body was kidnapping air from out of my lungs; I wish it was funny how “I love you” can sound like a threat coming from the wrong “right” person but there are days when I can’t even smile anymore, let alone laugh at the irony, how love and hate are identical twins so similar I can hardly tell which one I’m sitting with.

I hate how they look at me. like they can see: mangled memories held up by the ones who haunt me.  trophies– trophies. my head mounted up on a wall.

I am unrecognizable to myself. I see a half-beast in the place where I last glimpsed a girl, I find a changeling in the place where I last left myself. I am a trespassing visitor here, like a ghost so deeply in love but with the wrong world. Here I lie a freshly filled grave, half girl half haunting.

you came to me humble today. you have felt what my absence meant.   you come to forget your humanity in me. Icarus-breed. I am your sun.

I hate how they look at me. like they can see: mangled memories held up by the ones who haunt me.  trophies– trophies. my head mounted up on a wall.