holingues

i still can't eat a nectarine without  remembering the taste of you i still remember how you kept your hardest parts on the inside too.

I am learning every day how to be soft with myself, too.

i. the heat of the sun has drawn out the freckles on your shoulders and all across your sunburned nose. my mother used to tell me that behind each tiny speckle there was an inch of beauty as if your splendour had ever once been obscured. ii. there are forest fires just outside the city limits. "getting a bit too close for comfort", my grandfather says gruffly down the phone, even as he refuses to move away from the flames. from the upstairs window, i see how the horizon glows orange; the colour of summer peaches just ripe for eating. the stars must be humbled, the way that brittle plant growth just burns burns burns. iii. where they manage to escape the fires (for life does have a funny way of going on), the brambles flower a dusky pink. it won't be long before the blackberries grow fat and dark. i think of how we will forage until our fingertips turn purple and our palms turn sticky. i think of all that sugar, plucked from the bushes in that hurried, greedy way of the summer. we will rush to taste the sweetness, i think, before the berries grow rotten on the branch. iv.  funny how we chase the sun, knowing that this heat will never last. funny how this knowing does not make the freckles on your nose less beautiful. the knowing never stopped the trees from burning either.

one day, my love you will make a journey only ten words long and i know - lord i know - that it will feel like scaling mountains like traversing the stormiest seas but, my darling, i promise you that one bright morning you will wake  and say - i do not deserve this pain i am worthy of great tenderness

i have carved fault lines into my flesh with the most bitter edges of my sadness now i expose these jagged edges to the deluge in hopes that wildflowers  will creep through the cracks when this heartless winter thaws and it is spring once more

i owe my thanks to the ocean for she has listened to every word i have whispered to her kept every secret i have entrusted to her taken every salty tear i have cried beside her and made it one with her heart