Loustella Perry

My coffee has been tasting better lately. I rise every day and count the baby stars that have grown back after what felt like an eternal winter. My eyes have been heavier every morning, as I fall deeper and deeper into my dreams each night —they end every morning with a smile.

I open my eyes to absorb the golden specks of light from the morning sun.

The broken one with tired eyes, and tear stained cheeks, pulled a bandaged human heart from her coat and held it in her palms.

She smiled up at him with glassy eyes and trembling legs, and hoped he found her beautiful.

He reached down and took the heart from her, holding it, and looking at it while he spoke to her.

His voice began to shake,

My dearest and darkest beauty,

I still reminisce about my time living in the heaven in your palm. A world with a silver ground that radiated only enough heat to keep you breathing. It was the only warmth I felt for miles while traveling from one earth to another. I remember when you held it out to me and let me sleep there. I practiced standing still when you’d shake the ground, to watch me stumble. I know you had to drop me and let me float so I’d never forget what it was like to feel the bitter temperatures from all places that you were absent from.

That’s what gods do, you know, to remind you that the mind itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. So my body learned to live in your frost for it was warmer than the ice of having no place to sleep at all… and oh how your palm was my heaven, Dearest beauty –I forgot to thank you for the strength you gave me to walk in a straight line through your earthquakes, to rise while drenched in the fear of god. I know you had to crack the ground I walked on, when I was at my strongest. Things like that will never stop me from admiring the moon in your sky, and the way you’d take my hand and dance with me under it.

I loved the way you shook the earth or maybe it was that you could make the earth shake at all. Yes, I’ll admit I let you do it. Oh dear, how I’d smile even when your asteroids struck me more than once. I hope you know that the stars in my eyes that I’d carve out and hand to you, are limitless because I loved touching your hands. I stood within your universe one layer out of the cold and four away from you ever actually letting me in (thank you for pretending to).

I’d call you my best friend, light of my life, but I can’t because you weren’t. Oh dear me, trying to address you when I can’t … in my mind we’re still holding hands even though we’re not –because, when I told you all of your stars shining are beautiful and you smiled at me for real, I did mean it. If I could see you smile like that, one more time, I’d stop traveling again, because it shined brighter than the light of a billion suns, and I’d happily burn forever in your heaven. But I know, I know, you have to keep your planet temperate so your poets and soldiers keep dancing. I, myself, never truly learned to breathe in the cold. So I appreciate you understanding me when I jumped and dropped nine days away, in the forgotten betweens of traveling from one earth to another. I’m not from here, so I never learned how to worship a false god. But just know, my dearest, darkest beauty, that I hope you still roll them when they enter your universe

As I sit in my car at one of the places we used to frequent, I wait on the arrival of a friend. It reminds me of how I’d do the same when it was with you.

I remember the last time I was here with you, it was after everything was said and done, when we were trying to salvage a friendship. Except for the food, the table was empty.

It’s crazy because it was only a week prior, that the table was full and it made me wonder where it all went.

I remember the hurt words shaking from my mouth as I tried to not let any emotions show —I guess it wasn’t empty then. But I’m not sure if it was love. I mean, it was.

We both had gotten a taste of a life without the other and we both agreed that it’s a better life. I think that’s why it was empty.

Again, it wasn’t empty but it wasn’t the same.

The way we submerge ourselves in a goodness and we get so used to the goodness that we never really notice when it’s dwindling. But then it does, it runs out, and we blink and it’s a year later.

It’s January and it’s almost been an entire year since I’ve laid eyes on you. It’s a sad sort of happy.

I’m happy that we are both free from any chains that we wrapped around ourselves but it‘s still grief nonetheless.

It is crazy though,

how the pain stops instantly when I put definite space between us.

I thought I was a lost cause and would always hopelessly drown in your aura, but it’s not my cord attached to you, it’s how your hands wrap around my neck whenever you get the chance.

Yet, it’s so confusing when you begin to sing the words off your tongue that aren’t aligning with my inability to breathe with your grasp so tight.

He tells me he loves me with a knife in his hand, pressing it into my stomach. His mesmerizing gaze that holds onto my pupils, and demands I not look away. You can feel your whole body numbing, when things like this happen. You can feel your whole body forget what the nerve endings are saying because maybe those nerve endings are wrong and they don’t hurt because there’s a beautiful man standing before you telling you it doesn’t hurt.

I’d take my left hand and physically separate the Ulna on my right arm from my wrist, meditating on the snapping sound, letting the weight of gravity pull my arm bones apart before I ever feel my heart hurt again, the way it did last night.

My blurry vision was fixed on my ceiling and I let the salty tears burn my skin as they poured from the outer corners of my eyes. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s like there are oceans hidden somewhere inside of me.

The very tip of the sharpest, cleanest knife was breaking the surface of my heart like butter, and gracefully drawing a straight line to the bottom, exposing both of my major arteries.

There might be volcanos underneath my skin too, because my blood glowed inside my chest, like magma and disintegrated each of my veins, and all my bones, and my organs, one by one. —I felt every second of it.

The back of my skull against my pillow numbed in a way that I had been staring at the walls for too long, while my stomach had a swarm of terrified moths scrambling to get out of the spoiled corpse, that when even at it’s best, was never quite good enough for him.

My head felt a sense of urgency, —to jump up and stop him from hurting me. But he’s not mine now. Truly, it isn’t my problem. I can scream at him until I’m blue in the face but he’s still him and he will continue making me feel the way he did when he’d lie to my face and tell me he loved me.

Tell me how can somebody who I loved this much, not love me the same in return?

I let myself rot in it for about an hour before I promised my body I’d defeat anything that ever hurt me like that again.

What I would give to be able to turn back time and stop the world.

—to press pause; on everybody, and everything, and even you.

I’d pause it while you’re asleep and when I wake up at 2am, in your bed, in your arms.

I don’t care what you did, I don’t care what was said, I just want to spend one more minute in your arms.

A poem of mine called Highway was published in Brainchild’s 2024 issue.

On Sunday night, no one suspected a thing. It’s because at one point, I had visioned white and satin and lace, trail behind me but then it was dark. Now all that’s left is a damp black turtle neck and a steady flow of blood. No one suspected a thing. I wore a smile and fooled everybody when I walked in. I took my time hugging each of them, as the plum and burgundy liquid glided from my chest, down my stomach, creating a reflection pool on the floor of the bar. I hoped that if I pressed my chest into them tight enough, the pressure would be enough to clot the blood or sooth the ache or wake me up from my new reality. Then it was dark and no one suspected a thing. I could feel the burn of peach crown cauterize the broken skin as it moved down my tongue, through my throat, and into my chest. I couldn’t stop. The alcohol overpowered the sting of where his hands gouged through my chest cavity with just his finger nails. No one suspected a thing.

The night got dimmer and quicker and flashier and messier. One sip turned into $70 that I wasn’t charged but I sure drank it. No one suspected a thing until I said it out loud, “how could he have done this to me?” My whisper interrupted the conversation as the salt water began to run down my chin. The last thing I remember was all of them lunging at me, and then it was dark.