eyes to heaven

be passive. they try to stitch my mouth closed, stabbing the needle & thread in and out so i am volatile no longer. i gasp like a girl drowning, but i force words up my throat & spit them all out, daggers in search of places to bury themselves. what they don’t know is i’ve always hidden inside my body a tempest made of magnificence & fury.

another summer unravels before my eyes, & i am reborn again, restless as a hummingbird in flight, flitting across the endless, yawning sky. these months i spent dancing alone with you in the cruel cruel heat, waltzing on our carpet until we collapsed in a tangle of bare limbs & breathy laughter, faces aglow, flushed with a mixture of curiosity & rotten desire. the days were blurry with promises & warm, home-cooked food. just as i had before, i stumbled, half-drunk on youth & beauty, into the abyss of our love.

i. remember when we’d stay up until sunrise? you were always the first to fall asleep, holding your phone to your chest as if i’d hear the thrum of your heart through the static. my dreams were full of the telltale melody of your voice, as warm and golden as honey in the sun. ii. the sun rises and falls, and so does your heart. you don’t call anymore, so with every text i send i wish for you on a different star. the stars don’t answer, and neither do you. iii. i’d never imagined loving someone could ever feel like anything but a midsummer’s day. with you, i float through space ― the surrounding stars so luminous, yet so cold and faraway. iv. this time, i am the one who hangs up. i finally realise you’d been my shelter and my storm all at once, but never my heartbeat.

it was a profound, honey-stained afternoon & baby doves emerged from the rosen clouds on their first getaway, their youth in full bloom, wings fluttering like a handful of rose petals strewn across the canvas of a sun-drenched sky.

the sadness breathed inside of me like a living corpse.

please, name your price for your broken, deranged love — i’ve suffered enough; wrung my demons inside out.

it was a sodden spring day amidst the showers of april, and the world was thickly grey, rain-drenched, and hardly beautiful. but i was in love, so everywhere i looked was coated in a sheen of dust, made of something as ethereal as the glow of a firefly under a moth-bitten moon. the rain made everything look as shimmery and radiant as the melody i played with you that night, under this catastrophe of stars.

the strawberries in the farmer’s market have ripened & are as red as the rims of those heart-shaped sunglasses you wore when we came here last summer. now the sky is as wide as the hole you left in my heart amidst the rippling heat & i don’t go to the farmer’s market anymore because i see you in the silken dreaminess of the sunflower fields when it hits high noon & i can’t bite into a strawberry before the sickly sweetness tingles my tongue, leaving behind an aftertaste of you.

tell me, body. tell me about how i swallowed my childhood & buried it in the chasm between my ribs, letting it fester for years. where you might have once found love, were only lesions. tell me, body. tell me about how i sang my throat raw an ode to my hollowed-out bones, winter-whittled by a constant yearning for a missing piece of me — something i needed, but never existed. tell me, body. tell me about how my feelings had me hazy with obsession. what i wanted was beyond the horizons of impossibility & i was never given any tissues to soak up my idyllic tears. tell me, body. tell me about how i almost filled my lungs to the brim with day-old bathtub water, learning that the only way i could drown the sins out of myself was if i kissed my blessings & set them afloat.

i like to think that you can find all the places i’ve seen within me.