poemswithoutpens

and the earth has spun almost halfway around the sun, and we grew, and we grew, and we grew without noticing. on the way home, the darkness is held apart by the stars but i still cannot see your face as you say, it seems like we have been dating for longer than we have. i don’t know what it means. all i know is that you are a hopscotch kind of boy, steps  all laid out, always following directions and  somehow i have convinced you to skip over something. we have skipped something in me, too- the part where i am afraid, the part where i am running, the part where a demon swells up in my chest and tears apart this love with it’s teeth, i guess it is just not fragile what we have here. when i am with you, it has already been 1000 years. you are the love that has always been there.

on the night we realize we have matching toothbrushes, i laugh from the deepest pit of my stomach. a kind of joy rising to the surface, air hiccuping through lungs in the way it only does when a soul has found something. it is the weekend we share a bathroom for the first time, and as i drop my suitcase onto the empty bed i think about how sharing a life with you does not send fear jolting into my fingertips. and the next monday, when i wake up and roll over and when you are not there, that is when i start to wonder- start to imagine myself confessing It to my best friend, start to play with the words inside my mind. because somewhere in the mountains of maryland that weekend, i cried in front of you- in the way i only cry when i am alone, loud and convulsing- and you held on. and you kissed me in the morning, and you put the dishes in the dishwasher, and you glanced at me from across the room and we brushed our teeth with matching toothbrushes and that, i think, is love. 

a sun explodes, it’s  molten pieces skyrocketing towards the land. everywhere, there are  burns- charring across the remnants of the oldest forest. it is Pompeii all over again. It is the second time I survived the fire without a scratch, but this time I am standing among the wreckage. 

lately, i’ve been laying on your side of the bed. today, my eye was caught by a picture and a smile split my face like ripe fruit, something sweet dripping onto the ground from between my front teeth. in three minutes, it will be the time of day we have promised each other- one minute i realize now i have given to you for the rest of my life. it’s the first permanence that i don’t mind, the first forever that sends warmth into my hands. before you, i was always cold. but lately, the ember that had been smoldering inside of me caught a breath, leapt up like a dragon coming to life, a love being born. last week, i spent hours thinking of what it would be like to fight for you. to bare my teeth at a dark horizon, daring it to test me. i am willing to absorb all your hurt- i know you would never let me. a week from yesterday, you saw pieces of me that have never known anything but the inner walls of my chest. i let you touch the tears falling from my cheek. i know when i cry, it is not a pretty pool of simple sadness. it is an ocean, waves charging towards resolution, messy and ugly and raw. but you dropped an anchor, convinced me you will be here a while- in this storm of a thing that is the girl i really am. and lately, i spend every moment grateful. and tomorrow, i will thank and thank and thank until you understand that i have never experienced anything quite like you. 

twice today i have woken up only to find myself in my own body again, a  dislocation of self having pushed the brain away from it’s limbs, and i use the word it’s because the limbs do not feel like i own them, not now, not today. i know where i am. i can almost clutch the numbness in my hand like the softest steel, can feel marbles falling out of my heart into my feet as the world begins to be heavier- and heavier, and heavier.  to be in this place is to be in none at all, is to be laying already in the coffin and not desire to scratch the surface to get out. to be here is to sit, silent and still for entire minutes in my car. just a girl absorbing the night, just a girl wondering why she would bother to go inside, go anywhere, it is the first time that this version of herself has contemplated the idea of un existing- how warm it would be. how it would feel to have all of the pressure slide upward into the night, magnets re-inhabiting whatever star they came from. i know it will lift, eventually. i only hope this time it will leave me with more of myself whole. 

i don’t know what to do on the nights my doubt blooms like a tumor, a cancer of the lungs and with each breath it multiplies, malignancy flowing through the blood that pumps hard with every quickening beat of my heart, the beats wrapped in  unanswered text messages and long periods of silence and you leaving when my lips cannot imagine more than seconds without kissing you, every organ in me is swelling. and the growth begins in my eyes, and it pops from under ear drums and soon i am only suffocation, only a girl tossing back and forth in a pitch black room, planning the face she will make when she leaves so it does not look like she every lost herself.  if this doubt is a tumor, then it’s fuel is these walls hammered around the softest parts of me. to heal, is to let go. i promise, i am trying to let go. 

i kissed you. i didn’t say a word. 

you- hold you in it’s shaking arms.

and yet, you were also the year with the most love. the year i found my soulmate place, the home that has longed for me for so long. the year i met him. you were the year i learned to be who i am and speak it, loud and clear. you were the year i pulled people close. the year i loved and loved and loved until i had nothing more to give. 

i would say that when i looked at him i became the opposite of something.  i would say the scars you have seen are not the deepest. i would tell you about the days when i began each morning with an amputation- cutting off limbs and thoughts and swelling around the fear that i was too much. i became the word obedience. there were years that i cannot remember seeing myself - i was not  human, i was a phantom girl, haunting a body owned by a demon. i pressed destruction into my body, nourished it like a newborn child. i  burned the idea of becoming, of being. when he was not looking at me, i was gone. not because he did not see me existing, but because i  did not want to exist. 

we bask in the pool of happiness we built with our  own bloodletting- the one we filled by spilling grief into hand holding. there are waves crashing in every direction. it is, i suppose, a product of you being the moon- a product of the nights we have spent jawline to heartbeat, each thump pulling me closer to your own current. it is not so much tide pool as it is chasm- wide and dark and terrifying in it’s presence. a risk. a fear. a chance. we have known from the beginning that this was not a shallow love. to fully sink, we must be willing to drown- touch the bottom with our toes, suspended in a place where the world outside is blurry noise, an empty echo of  sound. and slowly, we exhale. deeper and deeper. air bubbles floating to the surface, a quiet reminder of each moment of broken history we are finally giving up.

i wish i could tell you that i am a broken girl. i am a heart guided by fear. i am emotions like a roller coaster, i am blasting car radios and temper tantrum. i am wild. i am ten thousand thoughts in a second. i am poem upon poem upon poem of speculation, a desperate predictor, eyes constantly squinting at the horizon ahead. i am terrified that you will stop loving me. i am consumed with mirage, or oracle- whatever this picture is that floats across my mind, that pinches my lungs together. it is the episode of us where you pull away. i have always been too much. i wonder if you fell for the illusion. i wonder if you love only the ground you thought i was, not the fault line, not the earthquake hands i kept behind my back while you glanced at me. i swear, i did not try to lie. it is just not in my nature to let the blood from my broken heart leak out, like that. i am trying not to lie. i am trying not to be too afraid. i repeat the words, recklessly optimistic until proven otherwise. i wonder if proven otherwise will come as quickly as it did with the others. i wish i could tell you, this- about me. about my heart. about the girl i really am. but every time i open my mouth, the silence hangs in front of each tooth like an iron gate. i am locked away, and i do not know who has the key. 

and this is me, pumping the breaks. and this is me, reading what is written on the stone, knuckles chasing hyroglyphics, fingertips pushing in circles on the crystal ball searching for the smallest hint of the future. and this is me, sensing the pebble of your hesitation, watching the mind spin it into a landslide where we are the wreckage, i am the broken one. and this is me, gazing at my own body from within it and around it- a disconnect. and this is me, wondering if any caterpillar has watched itself crawl out of the cocoon, seen the wing, an unfamiliar piece of herself appearing before her own eyes. and this is me, my own pinkies intertwined, promising myself I will not return to the girl I was. this is me, beginning to mistake your presence for a haunting. I’m sorry. It’s just that so many of the men I have loved have left me with their ghost.

and if i paint myself into the word, girlfriend- will it last? will this body break down in it’s desperate urge to protect itself, become a bomb, send  the wreckage of a torn heart ricoheting across his room. will it burrow it’s way into a part of me i would like to stay  the same? the way the current changes a river, when i told him he could not be the sun, he told me he would become the moon, instead. it has always been about the stars with us. it is a slow spiral into a new galaxy, it is two planets who are so used to orbiting alone in space, untouched by the gravitational pull, but he says- i just wanted to see you. yes, i say, but will you  always? there are too many questions and too much time to answer them and i wonder if i paint myself into the word girlfriend- will it last? will it crumble? and i wonder if i need to know, if it  even matters at all. 

Hope.

of fire for which the word ember was made.