that's just loverly

This is sorta useless. I don’t really wanna hear anything. I want the feeling of warmth on my lower back, the feeling of being squeezed tightly, I want to lie so close to someone that if we just turned to each other, our noses would be touching. I want someone to kiss me on the back of my neck. I want someone to watch me. I want someone to know about me what I know about myself. I want someone to repot plants with. Someone who will make me a cup of tea when my throat is sore. I want someone to know that I am beautiful. I want someone who will stand with me in the kitchen, their arms bracketing me as they lean forward and we both smile because we know that love is happening in that moment as well as we know that the other knows. It is an intimate moment that makes you feel like you’ve found your little pocket of the world. It is a moment outside of time. I want someone who makes me laugh. Someone that makes my friends and family feel relieved that I’ve found them. I guess I’m just lonely. I feel a little extra lonely today. I want someone to notice the bruises my glasses leave on my nose, or the way the three freckles next to my eye look like Orion’s belt. I want someone to think that I have soft hands and perpetually softer lips. I want someone who believes that I am good at stuff, that I am good at enough stuff to take care of them, and I want someone who’s just as good to take care of me. What does this all mean? When do I get it? Will I ever? Am I pouring my loving years down the bottomless well of self-reflection? Will I ever leave home?

I don’t know what to wish for anymore, now that I’m no longer a child and now that you’ve given back my heart. I don’t want it. It was made for giving away. You were a beautiful thing, and your hands were not cruel but not careful. You cut me at every turn, but I thought not cruel meant the same as kind, and so I thanked you for it anyways. I would’ve thanked you for marrying me. I should be thanking you for returning my heart. Thank you, by the way.

Only as morning came did I start to realizing that I wasn’t looking for anything at all. I was checking for holes. Some small wound through which I was deflating, through which all of my feelings were leaking out of me and disappearing into the night with a bindle and a cigarette. So confident they could make it on their own. My thoughts, my feelings, are so unlike me. No, I was lying in the early dawn in sweat and seven pillows, trying desperately to convince myself that I wanted nothing, in other words: the strong desire to be held was nothing to me, for I was a corpse in a coffin and not a human to a home. It’s easier to say that i don’t know what I want and even easier to say I want nothing. Even here, as I rise from my bed and walk to my kitchen, I can say I want nothing. Whatever I lost is unimportant. Here I have my real body, walking around my real home. Solid and lukewarm and fuzzy on the edges, but I am alive, and this is my body. I am alive, and this is my body. I am alive, and this is my body. I am alive, and this is my body.

All I want is to repent. To confess everything I’ve done, every poor decision, every cowardly moment, everything that disqualifies me from taking solace in that simple act of love. I want to look up at my love like a sinner lost in prayer, and feel their kiss like deliverance from the very heights of heaven. I want a love that feels like religion, and for the sublime, I’d fall with the likes of Lucifer for a chance at that.

A crystalline Soul has no ailment short of complete destruction, desolation, and discovery. A crushed Body can be fixed by as simple as a candle in the midnight of a small room. You can see, then, why I’m so relieved. Thank god my problem is of lust and longing and the feeling that I’m being haunted by the ghost of my own desire- that all sounds like a job for the Body. Doesn’t it?

I look to the people I’ve lost and wonder how much I’ve muted my own pain for my sake. Sorry, loves. I promise I miss you, and you will know it when I see you again.

Of course this is not meant for you. This is no ring, no love letter, no voicemail. This is not a thought strong enough to erase the feeling of my fingers reaching toward yours or my gaze moving with deliberate intent- the thought sits still on the floor of my mind for a mere second before being swept away like water. Maybe it was nothing. But I looked at you, and I thought this, and now I am wondering if I ever liked you in the first place. I do not hope to marry you. Just what I treasure about you.

Why have you given me a gift of burden? Stilling my fingers, holding my neck. I’m trying desperately to bury this weight under silk and soil and early dusk; and yet, I think of you. Don’t let it be known, but I think of you.