#kite strings

I am a boat with rotting floorboards and I am slowly sinking.

There are words I wish I didn't know. Like ache. Ache is exhaustion pulling at your skin. Ache is a hunger emerging from the pit of your stomach climbing slowly up your veins. Ache is the moon, sitting quietly in the dark sky with no one to notice her. Ache is such a lonely word. Lonely. Lonely. So close to lovely but can never become. Lonely is the star that adults forget. Lonely are the waves washing over the shoreline refusing to hold them. Lonely are heartbeats waiting to be heard. Silence. This is silence. Static. Unrelenting. Silence is a corner. Silence is a question. Silence is a trap. Silence are eyes peering at darkness. 

It's not them. It's you. It's you and your loneliness eating away at you til you're nothing but a rotting core, soft to the touch and browning acid at the edges. When they reach out to touch you with soft hands, you push them away, you huddle in the corner of the bed, you retreat into that inviolable corner of yourself, inside the comfort of your sharp elbows and knobby knees until they pull away, inch by inch, slowly, silently. And when you wonder why you're alone, here is why: you are what you are used to, you don't know anything else but your own solitude and anger and insecurities balled up so tight inside your small body and you won't make room for anyone else. 

I wish your hands were battering rams. Skin is so soft and these walls are so hard and my fists are so bruised from beating against this fortress of a heart and I am laying down, collapsing inside myself like a stacked deck of cards tumbling, crumbling. And I am tired, so tired, and I wish that your hands were battering rams, because skin is so soft and I don't know how to rise.

There are things I wish I knew how to say. I wish I could say that my heart is a bed of water and sometimes it feels like it’s flooding, but all I can do is watch silently as it overflows and feeds the roots of  my veins with salt water. My blood is failing. I am watching it slowly dehydrating, rubbed dry from constantly chafing against strikes of lightning. You wield words the way storms come. First, there come swollen clouds parting my blue sky. Second, there comes one droplet leaking out like a teardrop escaping from the tight grip of a faucet. Third, and from out of nowhere, the clouds open, spreading out their arms to welcome the coming onslaught. I am constantly caught unawares by the destruction you wreak on my heart. You have known me for quite a while. You have seen where I have grown, where I am most powerful. So you know where my soft spots are, where I don’t have strong roots to shield your strikes of lightning from burning my heart. And always, it burns. Always, I am left with wildfire that chars the daisies I cultivate and leaves the white petals singed black around the edges. And every time I burn, it leaves a scar on my skin, a twisted Lichtenberg pattern that wraps around my body, an invisible mark only you and I can understand.