ensleyum

by fifteen, they have already written their first eulogy. the subject: the first thing they ever loved. the subject: something with a name, something that answered when called.

by seventeen, they have watched summer die a hundred times, and each time it has taught them a new name for grief. they have mastered the art of goodbyes before they have learned how to drive.

at twenty, they take up smoking, or drinking, or the most dangerous of all—falling in love. they become connoisseurs of tragedy, collectors of last words, curators of the human condition.

at twenty-five, they know more ghosts than they do living men.

at thirty, they are old as mountains, weathered as scripture, worn as the first book ever written. their notebooks are filled with the remains of themselves—past selves, present selves, selves they once considered worth loving.

by forty, they are tired.

by fifty, they are myths.

by sixty, they are gone.

but tell me, is it death when a man has already lived a thousand lives? is it youth when a child carries centuries behind their eyes?

no poet died young.

no poet loves themselves. we are, by our very nature, an occupational hazard to our own sanity. to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, or so i once believed, but a poet cannot afford a romance so stable. we must always be the hunter and the carcass all at once. we are cursed to look into the glass not to admire the face we wear, but to see how beautifully the glass shatters when we press our foreheads against it.​

true art requires a magnificent kind of self-destruction. i cannot look at my own hands without wanting to turn them into an exhibit, and that is precisely why we are entirely incapable of self-preservation. the world expects us to cultivate roses, yet we prefer to garden the thorns simply because they possess a sharper wit. we barter our peace for a striking phrase and trade our contentment for a momentary flash of absolute brilliance. it is a dreadful trade, really, but a necessary one for anyone who wishes to truly live rather than merely exist.​

and then, there is you.

​i have spent an eternity avoiding the simplicity of peace, preferring the exquisite agony of a well-crafted line, but your presence makes a mockery of all my philosophy. to love you is to finally understand why a moth welcomes the flame—not out of a desire to die, but out of a desperate need to be filled with light, even if that light devours everything it touches. i have lived a life of deliberate artificiality, treating the world as a stage and my emotions as mere props, but the closer i get to you, the more my carefully constructed illusions begin to crack. i am terrified of this sincerity.​

the poet's curse is that no one will ever know the exact thing they meant. the poet's blessing is that no one will ever know the exact thing they meant.

you see a face that is not yours but you flinch anyway. you know it isn’t about you. the poem wasn’t for you. the painting didn’t intend you. the script forgot you. and yet the cadence gnaws like it remembers your gait. what you thought you abandoned in a former thought comes crawling back in lines you didn’t write. you mouth words that were shaped without your mouth in mind, and somehow they still fit. uncanny in the mirror-polished, too-specific, what-right-do-you-have-to-say-this kind of way. the curse of the creator is not that you are watched. it is that you can no longer look away. you see yourself in shards scattered across gallery walls and bathroom graffiti and footnotes of books that forgot their author. you are diluted, stretched thin over too many phrases, appearing as a sigh in someone else’s paragraph.

you relate not because it belongs to you but because you have nowhere else to go. identity leaks. your sense of self has been diluted by every metaphor you once crafted at midnight. you accidentally built keys and now every locked door opens you. you recognize your own handwriting in places you didn’t write. art leaves pieces of you behind in vessels you no longer steer. and worse: seeing those pieces in other people’s vessels, painted in their hues, delivered in their cadence, and yet—there’s the shape of your wound, the outline of your echo, the voice of your pulse translated into a language you never spoke. the self becomes too fluent in grief, too literate in symbol. once you make meaning, it starts finding you.

it is the nausea of ubiquity—being haunted by the silhouettes you left behind. you wanted to be singular. you wanted to vanish after the last sentence. but instead, you are infinite, uninvited, repeated. you exist everywhere now. and not once have you felt at home in it.

We don’t do sunsets and soft whispers; we do thunderstorms and howls in the night. It’s the fights and makeup sessions in the dark, the bark that echoes off brick walls, the bite that leaves marks. We’re the graffiti on the city’s veins, the undercurrent of chaos that thrums through the night. It's not about roses and moonlit walks; it's the growl in your chest at 3 AM when the world is silent but your mind is loud. It's the messy, unkempt love that smells of rain-soaked concrete and tastes like midnight cigarettes. It's the kind of love that digs up bones, unearths the past, and gnaws on it until there's nothing left.

We are the mutt in the junkyard, scavenging for scraps, surviving on sheer will. It’s ugly, unwanted, devouring. We hold onto each other with teeth bared, not because we’re perfect, but because we’re perfectly messed up. It's love that doesn't ask for a clean slate but revels in the dirt and grime of what is real.

When the world goes dark and all that’s left is the echo of our growls, it’s our love that’ll still be standing, teeth bared, eyes blazing. Unbreakable. Undeniable. Unleashed.

The unexpected is where the beauty lives. It’s in the spontaneous road trip to nowhere, the impromptu poetry reading in the park, the random act of kindness to a stranger. It’s in the way you laugh loudly, love fiercely, and live with abandon. It’s in the way you remind others that life is not just about surviving, but thriving.

You pack your bags, but how do you pack a feeling? How do you fold the sky into a suitcase or tuck away the sunsets in your pocket? Each item you stow away carries a fragment of your heart, a piece of the story you wrote in this place. The coffee shop on the corner where you spent endless afternoons, the park bench where you first realized you were in love, the window that framed your view of the world—these aren’t just locations; they’re chapters in your life.

As you turn the key one last time, it’s not just a door you’re closing. It’s the end of an era. The sounds of the place—the creaking floorboards, the hum of distant traffic—morph into a symphony of farewell. You take a deep breath, as if trying to inhale the essence of it all, to keep it with you for just a moment longer.

Walking away feels like leaving a part of yourself behind, like shedding a skin. It’s bittersweet, the way you can’t move forward without letting go. You know that new adventures await, that there will be new places to love, new memories to create. But in this moment, as you take that first step away, the weight of the past is heavy.