Unwritten

I don’t know if I’m still allowed to cry over you.

It still hurts so badly, but I think the pension for patience that others afforded me for processing has run low, or completely dry. Sometimes when I cry, your Dad asks me “why are you upset?”, and he doesn’t still cry like I do (or like I am right now)… How could he ask me something so ruthless? It makes me wonder: am I the only one who isn’t over you? If that’s true, how did everyone else heal their broken hearts? Please tell me you know, because I am at a perpetual loss for answers as to “why” you had to go then; or reason for me to persist, now.

No pain can compare to a Mother’s grief over the loss of her child, and it seems to have multiplied by the million for every second I have felt like I am truly alone in this.

I turn 30 in one week. I’m averse to this change simply because I feel so far away from you already, and I don’t want to drift even further, completely at the mercy of yet another invisible, unstoppable, merciless force. I got you when I was 29…and I lost you when I was 29…when that changes to 30, I’m afraid it’s going to create more distance between us; or appear to others like I am dwelling on something that happened a sufficient time ago, to be assuaged by now.

Let me jump so I know I am brave enough to do it, but… tie your will around my waist so I won’t hit the ground

Talk me out of my insanity because I’m not listening to me anymore 

“Please… don’t come any closer, unless you are planning to stay”

…So when I said I watched this field burn, I meant that I perched on top of my Mercury, thought to myself “how very fitting,” and fantasized about taking a walk into the flames -- to die among the vines -- entangled with our memories:

a perfect demise for a love story that never truly was now perpetually purged by fire

I romanticized my exit from this realm, reciting “ashes to ashes” fantasizing about returning my dust to dust

and then I let out a maniacal laugh, because the burn didn’t feel friendly

but actually hurt less, than when you brought a tongue full of lust -- with a fistful of matches as backup -- to carve our love’s epitaph;  ruthlessly and sweetly, inside my cheek, and into the book of eternity’s spine

The flame puckered its lips against my skin a flawless inferno that couldn’t be extinguished by even Poseidon

there would be nothing left of my body after this; no love left to give; for we are only loved by the thoughts we leave behind only whispers in a gust of wind

And when someone, someday, finds what’s left of my remains when they rake the leaves and shake the dust off my petrified shadow of perpetual pain

when they read my name, it will stake its claim:

“Here Lies the Girl Who Went Up in Flames”

March 11, 2021

 I want to wake up somewhere I don’t know Somewhere I’ve never been Someplace I didn’t ruin

 I want to hurl the contents of my body out of existence

 I’m feeling the urge to bury myself beneath my self-pity Out of self-preservation

Reminiscing on the sobering reminders of how close to death I really was, covered in my own blood from wounds I continually pried open with crowbars and bad choosing

Slowly swiping through photographic proof of countless bad decisions, remembering the slow burn of love starvation

I’m terrified of my own heartbeat I’m afraid it’s going to keep drumming against my will and make me feel the things I so desperately do not want to

 and that is why we are here, again

 I don’t want to hear how I need to work the steps or a program or whatever platitudes are projected at me from whoever thinks they know better, or who just don’t want to risk getting their hands dirty in my honor

 Besides, I don’t need help or more details on your 12-step infatuation