Gen of Eve

sometimes i think i am meant to bleed out in the snow. no warmth, no hands, no reason. just white silence and the body giving up. i tell myself i have to be okay with it either way. i try not to linger on what i can’t control.

so here i am, i guess. letting go. not abandoning the idea of love; just handing it back to the universe like something too heavy to keep holding. maybe i will be loved someday. maybe i will die alone. i think i have reached the point in my life where both feel survivable.

as if i am even ready for love at all. maybe the universe knows that. maybe that's why everything feels so still. i wouldn't know how to hold the very thing i ache for in my own shaking hands.

that's the devastating part: not that i don't have it, but that i might someday. that it could be real. because if it is, it only confirms the universe's cruelty: that i spent two decades consecrating my loneliness, making peace with the idea that i was meant to be alone forever, carrying the eternal wound of a mother and the voices that taught me this was my destiny. and it is only now (if ever) that i am deserving?

i don't know how to forgive the time it took to arrive here.

"Time slowed down."

and he won’t tell you that he loves you,

but he loves you.

And you feel like you’ve done something terrible,

like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt,

and you’re tired.

You’re on a walk with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you,

like a prayer for which no words exist,

and you feel your heart taking root in your body,

like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.