#poeticcorner

It has been...quite a while since I’ve found myself here. I have been struggling with my mental health, and feeling like I’m playing catch up on my own timeline. At 21, I find myself at a standstill with school, work, family. And on top of everything else, I’ve been confronting the shittiest descendant of writer’s block.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little more inspired to create. I realized that I’ve been having difficulty writing because I’m tired of writing about the ‘safe’ things. Things that I’ve talked about a few times already. And not that they aren’t of equal importance, but there are other events/stressors/clusterfucks that I deal with that I don’t address. Partly in fear of what it says about me, but largely in fear of how others will respond to it. 

This is the year of manifestation for me. I am going to stop running from the things that force me to stand my ground. I will not let my anxiety and fear of conflict quiet my beliefs. What kind of writer would that make me?

one of the first things you learn about relationships is that they come with heartbreak. it hangs back in the corner like a jilted lover, waiting for the day that one of you may trip and fall in defeat instead of for the other. sadly, there are no written guidelines as to what you should do when your heart feels emptier than your bed and your bed is just as empty as you.

so, here’s what i’ve managed to put together so far.

one. let it hurt. the waves of sorrow in your chest will inspire the tsunami in your eyes but for now, it is just about keeping your head above water. the storm inside of you will not quiet easily and for a while, you will feel like the tide of the ocean, coming back to meet the sadness you try so often to pull away from.

two. breathe. the first few days, it will be difficult. you will wake up in the mornings and have a rare moment of peace before remembering. and when you remember, oh, it will hurt just like it did the first time. your breath will get caught in that junction between inhaling and exhaling but keep in mind that, in that moment, holding on to something is more painful than letting go.

three. isolate. there is a fine line between loneliness and solitude. you must learn to take the former by its hand before finding comfort in the latter. pick up the pen, dip the brush in color, and rediscover the things that lighten the burden on your soul.

four. fall out of love. this, for me, has proven to be the hardest so far. my days are spent teaching myself to no longer whisper his name as a mantra in the intervals between each heartbeat. the moon does not bear witness to our starlit conversations anymore but rather looks on in concern as i have more talks with mary jane instead.

five. i do not know what five is.

I’m not going to pretend you caught my eye right away.  Not the first time I shook your hand, or the next time I bumped into you in the hallway,  or even the time after that when a whole bunch of us went out to dinner  and you explained the glory of your beard to me.

But you snuck up on me like the vodka I threw back the second time we drank together and I guess you could say the warmth that I felt spreading through my body has kind of stayed with me ever since. (We took shots to celebrate you breaking up with your then-girlfriend, which I think is a little bit of poetic justice on its own, but that’s irrelevant.)

I’ve always been a bit of a black sheep in my family and sometimes I used to wonder if that’s what attracted you to me considering your love for all things sheep.

Here’s how I see it. I’m a Bengali-American woman from a Muslim family with nine tattoos too many, eyeliner sharper than my tongue on some days, and a red lip dark enough to make me feel like sin. I walked with a warning sign right over my heart but somehow, you kind of just looked at the caution tape, decided it was worth the risk, and came knocking on the door anyways.

The first day you asked me what my favorite color was. The next day you asked me what my favorite food was. The day after that you asked me who my favorite person was.

And while your version of a one-sided 21 questions amused me, I didn’t realize until it was too late how easy it was to answer. It made sense to tell you that I grew to love the color blue after years of feeling just that, that my favorite food was anything my mother cooked because it reminded me of my childhood, and that my favorite person in the world…did not exist.

Now, I wonder if this was your plan all along. To teach me that breakfast is an all day meal or that mismatching my socks will make me even sexier or that Batman was the only superhero you’d let me fawn over cause…let’s face it. You’d be right there fawning with me.

I wonder if you leave the door open just a crack so it’s easier for you to slip back in without too much noise. I stopped making your side of the bed knowing that there are nights when you stumble your way back to my side. It’s easy to ignore the taste of indifference on your tongue when your hands are insisting that I matter. When you roll me onto my back and let me feel how much you want me, God, how easy it is to believe that you want all of me. You leave landmarks on the valley of my neck, as if you need a roadmap to find your way back to me. I listen for the way my name used to slip past your lips like a prayer and find that your new favorite word is ‘fuck’.

Fuck.

The red you left on my neck fits right in with the black ink in my skin and yet I have to remind myself that it should never be this difficult to find your way back home. It makes me want to write you out of my life so I start with changing the sheets on my bed. When your scent no longer lingers, I think with a clearer head. If heartache is the only thing you bring with you, then I’d rather have dinner alone than set the table for two.

You make me ache in ways that make me feel as though my bones are hollow. How else can this sadness echo in the way that it does? I seek solace in the arms of a friend I know won’t judge. You see, Mary Jane has this profound ability to lift me high when my heart sinks low. She holds my hand while I close the door behind you, and suddenly it becomes easier to breathe when your shortcomings no longer fall on my shoulders. I stand tall in the sun and find myself filling with hope again.

Who the fuck do you think you are? It’s so easy for you to come to your bro to tell him about how you slid into shawty’s DM and then eventually slid into her.   You could come to me and tell me all about the 36-24-36 curve on her body but apparently, I’m disrespectful for not curving the guy who asked for my number at the last open mic.

You know what I think it is? I think it kills you to see a woman who’s not as scared of herself as you are of her. The woman who glows in her unapologetic confidence, her unbridled intelligence, her unabashed significance.

Let me tell you what we like. We like the men who turn our names into mantras and reverent prayers because they see God in us. The men who strip us down to our very core before they even think about taking off our clothes. We like the men who let us cum first because we come first and it’s never too fast because these men always finish last.

I don’t want your two minutes of love and I definitely don’t need your two seconds of lust. You think I have a problem with a forever type of commitment but baby, I have seven instances of ink on my skin that say otherwise. I wear forever on my hips like my favorite pair of denim jeans, so fuck you for thinking they look better on her than they do on me.