Chapter One.

We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.

I am missing you most in the silence between songs on my favorite records. Sometimes it takes so long for the music to start.

“Listen to the sound of my knees dropping to the floor before I grace the bed with my frame. Listen to how everything rings out as weighted, as iron, as if a thousand lifetimes could be resting within my marrow. Listen as the ground cracks beneath these hardened palms, these scarred knuckles; it’s all from pummeling my name into the wrong walls guarding vulnerable chests. Listen to these echoes of desperate attempts as they scream DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE, DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE. Listen to this trauma drip from my jaw as honey without the sweetness; less honeycomb house to call home, more isolation room complete with white-washed walls. Listen to these feet of mine climb this bedside like a rock wall, toes gripping crevices in the sheet like lifelines. Listen to how all of this chimes out as a cry for help, until the slumber takes over and all is silent.”

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world’s greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding” 

the summer I was truly happy, we didn’t even speak.

he flirts with me,

“I felt so much that ended up feeling nothing at all. And I can’t decide which one is worse.”

“(…) suddenly I felt the despair of knowing, of never really forgetting, of seeing myself, to be so split.”

“The night went quiet the moment she closed her eyes and you notice that you’ve been staring again, knowing there is no way you are ever going to stop. There’s a sense of peace about her, a softness that never enters her face during daytime. Vulnerability that she would never show if she was aware she was being watched. And you wonder if it’s supposed to feel like this - no one’s ever taught you, no one’s ever told you if it’s normal that your heart’s beating so hard against your rib cage that bruises bloom across your chest. You wonder if it is supposed to feel like flying and falling at the same time, and if it’s ever going to stop feeling brand new, like a clean sheet of linen you wrap your body into. If it’ll ever get boring or ordinary in time - but that’s just not her. She’s a force to be reckoned with, a picture of power to behold. And yet she’s silent at night, she sleeps like everybody else, dreams like everybody else. Has nightmares like everybody else. History stretches between you, years and years of misunderstandings, of unsaid words and hurtful implications, but under the cover of night it all feels small, insignificant. Because somehow, however it happened, you still ended up here. Together, closer than ever before. But your bliss is short-lived, your happiness only a fracture of a moment. And in the morning, it’ll be different. You’ll pack your bag and she’ll offer you a cup of coffee, but it’s clear she doesn’t mean it when she asks you to stay for a while. She always asks, but you always leave, too scared that what you have will break beneath the glare of sunlight. When she’s with her friends, she suddenly doesn’t remember your name, forgot that the night before her hands roamed parts of you that no one else gets to touch. It hurts to see her like this, ignorant and mean, but your nights together are as fragile as she is and deep down you know why you never stay in the morning. You want to fix her, but you know you can’t. You want to fix her, but you’re scared you’ll fail and end up losing her in the small ways you get to have her. And you think that having her like this, under the cover of night with her eyes closed and her breathing evened out, is only the start. Be quiet for a second, be still. Because deep down, you know the end has already begun.”

I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this.

“After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives.”

“It was as if he turned into a door.” she quietly says as she laughs, although you can hear the hurt in her voice.

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”

“Who made you this way? And do they still matter?”