#hellholeglory

and it is Sunday morning, and you are still sleeping, and I am thinking about how the spine in my favorite book is cracked, and how it can never be uncracked. It is not an important thought, it doesn’t mean much, but it lingers. By some creeping twist of fate, we are now grown up. Who’s to say if we are done, but at least we have arrived somewhere, three months apart. Isn’t that funny, how you can’t seem to get rid of me? We only took things that mattered up the stairs, one by one. Beds, shoes, books with cracked spines. Something to keep me company, something to leave behind. I want attention, and you want a body. It is a fair enough exchange. These things we have learned how to give. The spine is cracked. Some nights I wonder if you would crawl inside my veins if I asked, to sleep in my blood and see if maybe then I could feel what I was afraid of. But then, we both know the one thing I could never do is ask. I don't stop touching you until I fall asleep, fingernails trailing your back and remembering the scar on your shoulder, remembering the night my heart broke with you, remembering that this is borrowed time. Crack. Apparently, if you have a lump in your throat, you can just swallow it, cram it back down your windpipe, like you were never a child, like you will never be one. and it is Sunday morning, and my finger traces the crack of your spine, right down the middle.

“Do you want to be loved, or do you want to be desired?” You say it not in so many words, but enough for me to catch the meaning. You say it at 1:30 a.m. on the one night we thought we wouldn’t drink, and look at us now. Sneaking into the kitchen to challenge our livers and our inhibitions. We could never be drunk enough to not know what this means. You say it like an offer for one of the two. I just have to take it. I am waiting for something in this house to be louder than the beating of my heart. I am waiting for my head to tell me this is a bad idea. Aren’t they two sides of the same coin, love and want? And aren’t your fingers itching to flip it again after it has landed on one? This feels personal. There is no one around sucking the tension out of the air, nothing to drown out the promises you whisper. We have touched before, before the world had started holding its breath and freezing the moments. Your hands are much louder now, and they reach for me, and I don't think about you touching me. I think about being touched, about being warm and beautiful, and about how I will never forget this. I tell you the last part, and it sounds like an accusation. Love is patient, love is kind. What is this, then, if it is not love, but it simmers so slowly? Should it be more eager to boil, just so we can know the difference? I have learned to run marathons long before we met. My lungs remember what it feels like to save strength, to hold hope. They teach me again now, because we can feel a heat creeping, reaching for our heels. What if it has caught up with us after all these years, ready to collect? What side did the coin land on this time, dear, please tell me, I am too afraid to look.

The ways I love: 1. At first, it was deliberate. I chose you, picked you out, thinking it was still a game. I was too young for it to be serious, but I didn’t realize I was too old for it not to be. Crush me. Mold me, but never look at me too long. If I find out who you are before I have done everything for you, I won’t know who I am. It lingers, but it doesn’t burn anymore. Maybe it never did. 2. You want me, for now, for however long, I don’t dare to ask. I can’t risk it mattering to me, so I take another shot and your eyes shine again. You’re pretty, I think, and you touch me like you touched the others, and I can be a part of something if you want me to be. From midnight until the sunrise, until I walk home and feel the breeze announcing the end of summer. It will never be the same after this. 3. The promise of a new beginning, only a glance, you don’t even make eye contact. Strangers have a way of tugging at your heart that makes you desperately want to be in a braver body. 4. It would almost be too perfect, so I don’t let it be love. Or perhaps I do, but you seem good, so I refuse to let it get to my head how you hold my hand or my waist or my whispers. Something always simmers, it’s a tug of maybe-love that will never end. If it did, it could only go wrong. 5. The search for kind eyes in a loud room is often a hopeless one. Every now and then, it makes the hands on your hips feel more tender than they are. Less hungry, if only for a while. 6. At the end, there is always a mirror. There is always another side of the bed. There is always a scale that is recklessly tipped, that swings back and forth like a pendulum. It is a necessary evil, this love. It is the only one that’s ever only yours.

We're doing that thing again, where it gets dangerous. And I'm starting to see elephants in rooms they could never fit in, and he keeps his eyes closed. That way, maybe the kettle will finally boil.

My fingers haven’t bled in years, and the wounds have healed up so much I’m starting to doubt they were ever there in the first place. The ‘you’ in my poems has always worn the same face, because it was only ever you I wanted to say anything to. If I write this down, surely it must echo somewhere. This longing I have no words for, this haunting in a language my mother didn’t teach me. No one ever has to read it, or hear it, or say it back to me, but someone has to feel it. I remember a time the night air called out to me through a cracked window, and I wanted nothing more than to taste it, because it smelled like serenity. There is a nostalgia buried so deep between my memories I struggle to grasp it. My fingers haven’t touched yours in years, and there is no tragedy here, only a notion. That’s all it ever is.

Your hand on my stomach, my back to your chest, my blood the echo of my pounding heart in my ears. I beg the noise away, and your hand moves, and I barely flinch and it doesn’t feel wrong and that's  worse. Your hand down my back, your fingers on my thighs and up and down and up again, under my shirt and in my hair, and thunder breaks louder and longer than I’ve ever known. It sounds like an omen, and my body shakes once it’s mine again. Your hand on me, my chest is a cage and a battlefield, my head spins before I move because I know if I dared I would spin, all the way, all I’d have to do is roll over, and you would still be there, and you would be real and you wouldn’t stop touching me and remember the edge I once talked about, the one we keep stumbling towards? I thought if we turned around we’d be safe from the pit, turns out you can’t outrun something that lives inside your heart. Your hand moves, up and down, up and down, under my shirt, over my pants, up and down, trailing lazily and with too much purpose to mean nothing, up and down, and I shouldn’t feel it anywhere else but I do, up and down, my chest rises up and down your hand moves up and down my mind goes up and down and up in flames, up to something, up to no good,up, up, down. Your hand is all over my thoughts, waving them away into the fog that forgets them, your hand doesn't stop and my skin pays the price, wearing the memory of your touch like a secret carved just underneath the surface, your hand almost wakes the ugly courage sleeping in my heart, your hand is everywhere and always and I like it.

Here’s a few things I really want to tell you, but I can’t, because then I’d have to talk to you: 1. I took down most of our pictures, and no one noticed yet. 2. Most of my memories of us are stained with wine, and now most of the wine I drink is stained with you. 3. Sometimes I’m afraid that I only broke up with you to prove to myself that I was never really in love with you at all. 4. I miss you, I do, more than I thought I would, but I don’t miss who I became around you. I don’t miss missing you. 5. One day, maybe soon, we’ll see each other again, and I hope you’ll be okay. It’ll sting if you are, but I deserve it. I never meant to hurt you, and I need to accept that maybe I truly didn’t. 6. Shit, I should have listened to your heartbeat when I still had the chance. 7. I get nostalgic for a time when I still had your number saved and didn’t feel like shouting at our friends to notice we don’t talk anymore.

1. The Lucky One - On the first one, you'll waste the most time. Maybe a year, maybe seven, just so that it can feel like a fairytale for four magical moments. You'll cry on your way home more times than you'll smile, and that should have been enough warning. You're not the Princess, and he's not the Prince. 2. The Ghost - he has you pressed up against a wall and the way he whispers in your ear you know it will stay with you. He texts you once every blue moon, like a broken record, and you'll try to make it work, but he won't. It's cathartic, but the saddest kind of therapy, barely reassuring but always taking something, time, a piece of your heart, energy, until there's nothing left to give. You never delete his number, even though it always changes. 3. The Best Friend - You want to be someone's, and the way he touches you is so familiar and safe. You wait too long and he never figures out what he wants, and you miss each other. Only he moves on, and you're too proud to let go, so you shed your skin and heart in the place your paths last crossed in hopes of coming back there one day to reclaim yourself. The time doesn't come, and you feel naked from now on. 4. The Boy of Summer, or The Lucky One pt.II - He seems silly to even mention, because it's been so long and so far, it's probably all a dream. Soft hands, stars so bright they blind you for a second, skinny dipping at 2 AM and leaving before you're too alone, cigar smoke and mosquito bites, and a kiss on the cheek. You fall asleep in the cold, and tell yourself it's still summer. - They all come back, some more than others. And one by one, you say goodbye, either in your mind or out loud, because you miss too much the parts of yourself you gave to them. When you take them back, they're bruised, neglected, and they barely fit anymore. But only with them, and the memories they made, you are whole.