skribe

i sit up finally, rub the sleep from my eyes. i begin to kiss you gently. your forehead, your nose, the corners of your mouth, your cheekbones, the mole on your chin. there is no part of you i want untouched by my love. you smile before you open your eyes, already saying hello, calling me a pet name before reaching up to pull me down for another kiss. i whisper i love you in the space between kisses, soft, so as not to disturb the early morning air. the world is so still, so quiet. if i could live the rest of my life here, in soft sunlight and sheets, in your warmth, i would.

i am told that heaven is paradise, and here you lie next to me: your hair a mess, no makeup, teeth unbrushed. your breath smells bad in the morning, and you snore, and you always press your cold feet onto my shins. i tease you for these things, and many more, but i could never grow to hate it. i could never grow to hate anything about you.

I don't have anything to do tomorrow except dishes and make my bed, but the day after is Easter. My family will still pretend they do not know my name, but there is time. There is still time.

It is hard for me to remember that. I have a bad memory. Faces, dates, if I ate dinner last night, what I was going to do just now: all mysteries. I'm working on it. I'm working on a lot of things, and I have to assume the universe is too.

I don't want to die tonight.

I haven't really been a hypochondriac my whole life, but I have been on recent months. I suppose it is because I have something to live for. Some of it is obligation - good granddaughters don't kill themselves, good roommates pay rent. Some of it is just to prove to myself that I can stay alive.

Besides, I want to marry my girlfriend. I want to be a Coulson, build my family with her, live happily ever after. A pink house. We'll be warm, and happy, and surrounded by colors.

So I don't want to die. It's new, actually. It's odd to care, strange to google symptoms and get worried about serotonin syndrome. I don't want to die - for the first time in ages, I'm not even considering trying.

I don't want to die tonight.

the cat never did a number on me, and this time it literally was a cat.

i have never had a cat before. i didnt know that she wanted to be put down.

rumbling purrs and rumbling in warning feel the same when it is new.

i have known both in pieces, but i have never lived with a cat.

a lot of things are new for me, but one thing is the same.

i still wish someone would ask about the cut on my wrist.

i still hide it - something tells me i should be ashamed.

the scars on my leg and the cut on my wrist are the same.

when someone inexperienced handles something unassuming,

something finds me lying on the forest floor and it obscures the few prinpicks i have left

it smells me. what does it find? can it smell my sweat? my desperation? my decay? can you smell what little remains of the person i once was? can you smell who i could have been clinging to me still?

all i know is the darkness looks the same when my eyes are opened or closed.

i have been trying to convince myself this whole time that it would not happen, even though it has been building. piece by piece, everything falls away.

it was always destined to, i think.

i have lost track of what was the first thing to go. of what things i have lost and what things i have given up, all in the name of reaching an end goal.

there was no backup plan, really. there is no safety net in space. there is nothing stationary to attach one to.

i packed too much baggage. there was not enough fuel to carry the weight of me and everything i came with.

maybe it would have made a difference if i had come with less in the first place.

does that matter? i dont know if anything unknown will ever matter.

it wont to me. nothing matters to dead people.

i should have brought less. i should have planned better. i should have used my resources more efficiently.

I know not the cross I must bear, I know not whether it be a cross,

But I know within my bones that I will design it

I will cleave the wood with intricate designs, stain it with my blood,

Meld my back into the front of the shape I have created with an oath.

I think I need parts of people long gone to remember parts of me,

And I think the only way I know to lose the parts I have forgotten is to fill the holes:

I will melt the wax from the statues of my new friends' faces

And mold them to tenderly kiss the gaping holes from crosses borne and tossed aside.

I wonder if anything will ever love me with the such passion as I hate myself?

There is a certain tenderness in knowing I care so much as to create this cross I will bear,

In knowing I am both creator and beast. The peices of me are forever tangled:

I still have all your collections. The bracelets from your trips to the hospitals. The bottle caps from the malibu and the pink moscato. The three necklaces: your sister, your best friend, yourself. The friendship bracelet you made at camp where you had no one to trade with. The keychain from the artist you don't listen to anymore, save for nostalgic days. The scrap of yarn woven into your first uneven crochet rows. The honeycomb ring, the bracelet with a green gem, the shark figure. Your notebooks.

Why did you have so many notebooks and sketchbooks? You barely ever finished them, yet you hung on to every one. You kept every folder of loose paper, too, and still you miss what you have somehow lost. You have an archive of every thought you thought was worth writing down at the time, and still, you worry you kissed something.

Are you looking for something other than a reason to believe you are the main character with a tragic backstory, or are you really just such a self-centered bitch you think every moment of your life deserved to be documented? Is it you who makes me take so many pictures and write obsessively and keep lists so long I need lists to keep track of them all? Why do you think our life needs to be recorded like we're a fucking spectacle?

We are nothing. Okay?

I'm sorry. I know you wanted to be something. I know when I was you, fourteen and scared, all I wanted was to be remembered. You wanted to be a household name. You wanted to be on talk shows and billboards. You wanted to be in libraries all over the world, but most importantly the one in the town you lived in. The town that I hate, which you still believed loved you as much as you loved it.

We are not anyone important to anyone people care about, but we are important to the people we care about. Is that enough?

And I hate you, you know that? I hate you. I do not think I will ever be able to love who I was from fourteen to eighteen. You were a waste of who I should have been, and the only useful thing you ever did was turn into who I am now that I'm twenty. Someone who cares enough to be someone worth knowing by the time we turn thirty.

I hate you, all the way up until eighteen. Your body and your mind were sick, and I cannot forgive you for doing things you knew were wrong and harmful. I want to kill you tonight, so hopefully when I wake up tomorrow there is no part of you left inside of me. There is nothing worth keeping of you. Your poetry is shit and your photos are garbage at best.

They say one man's trash is another man's treasure. Good. Let someone else remember you, love you, keep you alive. I have had my fill of you: the first eighteen years, and especailly the last four of those first eighteen, are enough to last me a lifetime.

I sometimes wish eighteen years was all the lifetime you got. Maybe someday I will burn all that remains of you, and you will die the way you should. The way you wanted to.

I would release your ashes into the ocean with the letters you wrote to [...]. I wouldn't want you to be alone when you finally died.

a house with a stable floor and a big yard for the dog.

i want music playing softly with your laughter through the walls,

and i want to worry about nothing at all.

there are five colorful stockings on the fireplace,

each of them meticulously planned and homemade

with matching colors and matching last names,

and photos of our family hung in matching frames.

all i want for Christmas is your love and your laughter,

As people and cars and stories I didn't know passed me by

The shooting star never came blazing across the sky

Like it did a lifetime ago as I laid in the field that night

Maybe I was distracted, looking in my lap at my phone

Maybe I was thinking too hard about my family at home

Maybe I was too busy calling that friend I don't want to know

Maybe I didn't see it, or maybe it just didn't show.

I am living in the past and the future and never the present

Until I suddenly notice I'm about to up and end it

I look up and somehow the sky has lightened

I've stayed all night, and there's nothing quite like it

It doesn't have to be so hard to be a person, you know

All you have to do is learn how to breathe and let things go

All I have to do is learn how to move on and grow

Frantic so I don't forget the way this exact moment feels,

Even if it is preserved on a scrap of something

Others might call trash. I met you and you met me at the wrong time,

But that will just make the right time all the more sweet.

I'll write poems for you 'til then, drinking bomb pop liquid IV

And dreaming of the day I can buy an expresso machine.

I don't even like espresso, but you like fancy coffee

And I want to learn how to use it before our first apartment

You'll stay up late unpacking and I'll make you a blueberry espresso

So I can wake you up with kisses and caffiene waiting by the window.

I love you with all of myself, like I love all imperfect things.

I still think of the time you said "You're imperfect, but you're perfect for me."

We will get married in late summer - don't you think 8/26/2032 looks nice?

We'll cover the forest floor in moss, I'll weave your flower crown if you do mine.

A small venue, not many guests, somewhere new, I'll carry a pen

And I'll scribble notes that come to me on the napkins

Or the menus or my hand or your arms, and I'll sign your skin with a heart.

I love you unhurried. Loving you is the easiest thing I have ever done,

It's the waiting for the rest of our lives that is hard. I loved being in love in our teens,

1. The smell of freshly cut grass and rain mixed together. My favorite smell, not that anyone's ever asked. Who asks weird questions like that, aside from me?

2. Weird questions. Invasive and bold and all-too-familliar for the level of friends you are with whoever comes along next. It's the best way to get to know someone, asking them things.

3. The color blue. Green is my favorite, but I secretly wish it was blue.

4. The ocean. Specifically Ocean City, New Jersey. Shriver's saltwater taffy, wet sand, the sound of the waves, the smell of saltwater throughout everything.

5. Music we would listen to together. I'm not selfish enough to think someone would care to look up Chloe Moriondo or Sophie Thatcher after I died, but maybe they'd listen to the playlist I made them. Catered to fit both of our likings.

6. Sleeping on the phone, or even just phone calls in general. The comfort of knowing someone is there even when you can't see them.

7. Blue mentos gum, specifically in the little containers with ten in them. The gum I chew to get rid of my migraines and wisdom tooth pain and overwhelming urge to always be speaking.

8. Noise. I don't care what kind. If it's too quiet, I'm not there. Blast music when you mourn me.

9. Shows and movies I used to love. KPDH, AOS, KATAOWB, SATPOP, ATLA, and so on. Things I used to find myself in. Things I used to cry to.

black holes exist when gravity gets too heavy & the mass inside the gravitational field does what it was supposed to... collapse. black holes are pinpricks where there used to be something BIG. the black hole i live in is inside my chest & it has sucked in everything i have ever loved. time screeches around me - i am frozen in place to those who can see me inside the black hole, but inside, i am moving quickly. somehow, i run forward as fast as i can while remaining completely still. the only people i can interact with properly are those ive sucked in with me.

my love is a curse. i think in order to love someone, i have to pull them into my orbit. when youre in my orbit, youre in my black hole inside my chest, trapped in the bars of my ribcage.

life inside black hole is funny when its inside you. everyone else has a chance to escape, & they spend all their time around you dreaming of the day and figuring out how.

And I often find myself wondering

If you’re thinking of me the way I think of you.

Do you mourn what we didn’t get to do?

I miss the lives we never got to live,

I miss the love I’ll never be able to give

You tell me you’ve found a new person

And I feel the sound of my heart open

There’s a wound hidden in my hair –

You carved your initials with care

Into the back of my skull, you know where:

You used to kiss me tenderly there

As we lay, back to front, in your bed,

Where I was for once not lost in my head.

I’m not your soulmate, but you are mine:

You are the reason I can learn to find

Reason to love my unwinding mind.

You’re always my honey, my girl, my light:

Call me if you ever miss the nights

We’d spend tangled together, limbs bare,

good.

i want to know the differences in you now from you when we met. i want to know what color your hair is and what you’re changing your major to and how things go with your new person, as you call them. i want to know if you’ll ever move to new england. i want to know how your dog and your brother are doing, and i want to know if you ever figure things out with either of your sisters.

i do not want to hear you laugh again. i do not want to be the reason you laugh.

i dont know if i want to kiss you any more, but i know you will never want to kiss me again. the choice is already made for me. i dont know if that brings me any relief or not.