#ex-c

They can face the world looking free of any guilt because the world helps them cover up its scars. 

They get so good at playing pretend because everyone else happily plays along with them. 

They know that every single time they hurt someone else,

they lose nothing 

but bits of the integrity no one else has anyway. 

So they continue doing what they do 

as they wait for a sanction that will never come. 

And this brings us back to that timeless question:

You who create, you who make things out of the void that exists in you, you who surround yourself with music and colors and sentences, and dreams made out of air and hope, you who persevere even when success is out of sight, you who push forward knowing that the end might be a circle pointing back to where you started; you are art, you are life itself, and I want you.

You who fight the battles that no one else has the courage to, you who are honest to the point of mutilation, you who slip blades between the sinews of your muscles, you whose mouths open wide to receive the handfuls of pills that you bless your bodies with, you who do not know how to count and thus arrive at the point of fatal excess, you must stop, but I want you.

You who believe in change even as you see how immovable the earth is, you who are not afraid of the elements, who worship physics, who adore biology, you who evolve until you are inferior no more, I want you.

You who hate your minds and brains, you who want to escape your very bones, you who feel like dull metal even as you feel the blood in your veins, you who know how empty one can possibly be, I want you.

You who give in to desire, you who embody temptation and seduction, you who are comfortable with the dirty and primal and visceral, you who feel your intestines crawling inside of you but still call it home, you who will cut off your parts given the chance, I want you.

You with the smeared lipstick but still walk with your heads held high, you with the ruined mascara, you with the soiled clothes and no one to say goodnight to, I want you.

You who learn lessons and forget them immediately, you who burn everything in your path, you who beat the box to a pulp, you who don’t listen, I want you.

You who count time in sets, in lines, in pages, in blinks and fallen eyelashes, in wishes, in nightmares, in inches of rain, in the speed of sunlight as it arrives eight minutes late, you who never see the hours until they are gone, you who have no concept of time, I want you.

You who are lost in chaos, you who cry to the point of drought, you who come up for air but find that the shore that will save you is not within reach, I want you.

You in whose veins flow paint, and alcohol, and cigarette and weed smoke, and cocaine and meth and heroin and who has acid in your tongue, whose highs are never high enough, I want you.

You who are broken, who are sitting on the floor holding all your pieces in your hands and wondering why glass breaks so easily in all its beautiful transparency, I want you.

You who love the word “fuck” as much as I do, in all its forms: as a verb, as a noun, as a gerund, an adjective, as a fucking way of life, I want you.

And you, you who will fascinate me until the very essence of you permeate the molecules that make up my body, until all my atoms rearrange to revolve around you; I want you. You will not be my fairytale. You will be the one who destroys me until I learn what it is to write in the most genuine way possible, because the pressure has to be released, because you will push me to the sharpest edges I never knew existed until you.

I want you.

I want all of you.