#th-w

that when he dealt his brother a mortal blow, abel would fall and never get up?

they were the first humans,

had they ever seen anyone die?

surely, abel, keeper of sheep, provider of meat for his family’s table, must have known.

did cain know? that humans are animals, i mean?

that if you cut their throat or strike their temple,

they would bleed out like all the other lambs to the slaughter?

what about god—creator of man, infinite wisdom, all-seeing eye—

surely, he must have known that in making abel more worthy, favoured, more deserving of love,

it would turn his brother on him?

do you think god knew, that in picking favourites,

he would turn a man into a murderer?

the first son, committing the second sin—

do you think god cared? that he did it on purpose?

years ago, he created something perfect, but they fell short of his glory.

he must have been disappointed. scorned. jaded.

do you think he did it on purpose— separating the seeds of good and evil into two boys born of his original creation, setting his sights on pure abel and leaving poor cain to confirm his theory that we are all sinners?

and what about abel?

second-born and keeper of sheep.

he must have been surprised that day,

going out into the fields with his brother, only to fall by his hand.

do you think his innocent blood churned in the earth when he heard cain renounce him?

when he heard that trembling voice lie and ask, ‘am i my brother’s keeper?’

did his spirit cry out in betrayal, spitting out a litany of ‘yes!’ in an endless cacophony?

Me, sitting in bed at night recalling the time I wrote you a story with a handicap.

Me, passing by a mirror and remembering all the times I unironically spent hours looking up things you wanted to know in passing.

Me, writing this poem. Writing all the other poems.

I’m in an empty room, professing, “this is the end of my love. I’ll never seek out affection from you, and if my hand ever starts to reach out again, I would rather it gets burned.”

The walls hear me; they soak in my words. They are my only witness, but I will remember.

The echoes of the way I loved you scream at me, urging a fresh influx of memories—

Me on the possibility of my deathbed, still choking on my words like the coward I’ve always been.

Me, waiting for you and your texts and your voice notes.

Me, chasing pipe dream after pipe dream, telling myself ‘this is the last time,’ every time.

But enough is enough.

There’s only so many ways I can be pathetic before the last shreds of common sense scrapes itself together and takes the reins from this silly heart of mine.

I’m shedding off the dead skin part of me that loved you, blocking out the echoes, retracting the desperate need that claws for you to love me .

I’m still begging for the feeling though, except now I’m pleading for anybody to love me.

‘It doesn’t have to be you anymore,’ I say.

It doesn’t have to be you.

you smiled, all sunshine and pearly teeth and blinding warmth, and asked if I wanted one.

it’s sweet, you said, calling me ‘darling.’

sickly sweet, I complained, nose wrinkling.

so we sat at the table, arguing back and forth on a hot day, about cherries.

you wanted to convince me, so you leaned over and put your lips to mine, tongue licking into my mouth when I gasped in surprise.

see? it’s just right, you said afterwards, leaning back with a smile, knowing you’d won.

I always fell for the wrong people, but you were made of summer and light,

kissed like the swaying ripples of the pool in your backyard, and in the case of both water and the sun, you were intangible.

Slippery.

I couldn’t hold onto you, though I tried

on new year’s eve, i slept at dawn and woke late in the afternoon;

not because i wanted to, but because it was all i could do.

i wish i never had to sleep, and i wish nights wouldn’t exist

because only at nighttime when i’m supposed to be asleep, do i lay awake and feel the deep empty anguish of having no place to belong.

no one to belong to, nothing to call mine.

i want to go home, but i don’t know where that is anymore.

at nighttime i feel more clearly and painfully the truth that i am no longer my father’s daughter, nor my mother’s daughter.

i’ve always heard that home is where your heart is, but recently i’ve also heard that you shouldn’t make a person into a home— so which is it?

where does my heart lie in the first place?

not within the cold walls of the house that belongs to a mother who doesn’t acknowledge me, but maybe in the hands of my little brother who i think of all the time of late?

not within the grasp of a father whose words i stopped believing in years ago.

maybe it’s even farther away, across the world,

still laying discarded at the feet of someone i had no business giving it to in the first place?

maybe it’s with my sister, who i haven’t seen in eight years.

maybe my grandmother cradles it to her chest and breathes warmth onto it to keep it beating every time she sends me bible passages i know i won’t read.

maybe my heart is in all of those places, bits of myself that cracked and fractured over the years. i don’t know.

sometimes i feel it ache so intensely in the caverns of my hollow chest, so i think it may be here with me after all.

but ‘here’ doesn’t feel like home, and i’ve been drifting so long in the endless nights, i think my heart may have withered without any light.

i think i stopped having a home a long time ago.

on new year’s, i’ll probably go to sleep at dawn and wake late in the afternoon—

not because i want to, but because it is all i can do.

i want to go home, but i can never go back home because the last time i felt home was as a child.

i can never go back to being my father’s daughter,

and though my mother and i always felt like strangers, i can never go back to that moment in time where the distance between us was a little less.

it’s haunting,

this crevice in my chest that keeps longing for somewhere to belong,

the other day, i could have sworn i was just 18,

sitting in my bed and agonising over my whole life stretched out in front of me.

today, i sit under a different roof, but in my bed nonetheless

nearly 23, and agonising over the life that’s passed me by

a future that slipped through my fingers so fast, i could not even think to grasp it.

time flies, and if that’s the truth, then i would like to hack off its wings with a pair of shears.

cripple it like it has done me, and demand of the bloody thing to return what it stole from me.

i am usually not so cruel, forgive me—

but at 18 i was so determined not to regret anything,

yet here i sit: 23, and all i’m made of is bitter resentment.

starved for things i have never known—

whenever i get a taste of something sweet

i always want more.

i am starving, aching to sink my teeth into something tangible and lasting

but even then i think i will still be hungry,

still empty and hunting to devour.

the kind of emptiness inside me is a deep, dark gray,

heavy and sparking with the threat of a downpour,

the magnitude of which could drown an entire world.

when god sent down a flood to destroy the earth in the first days, he rolled the aftermath of that tragedy into a densely packed nest of water vapour and held onto it,

and when he created me, the last thing he did was shove that leftover tempest inside my chest.

i was riding on the bus the other day, and out of the corner of my eye, i saw something eldritch-shaped in the sky.

could have sworn it was the face of ‘God,’

then i looked out the window, really looked—

turns out it was just the sky, full and laden with the distant threat of rain.

it got me thinking about the relationship between god and the majestic nature of the word cumulonimbus—

no correlation between the two, mind you—

one’s a fancy word explaining the dull, colourlessness of the world as it decides to spit open a torrent of destruction or blessings, and the other’s a storm cloud.

what i’m trying to say is, the hunger inside of me is cold and dark and grey—

feels heavy,

presses against my chest like a thunderstorm about to break loose,

at its very core, a stretching hollowness.

if you reached out to touch a raincloud, you wouldn’t feel anything except your fingers coming away a little wet.

my longing is deceptive like that; a mask for the foggy hollowness inside.

it wants to be filled:

religion won’t cut it,

and neither will love.

god ladened me with this emptiness, and only he can fill it.

what im trying to say is,

i have begun to wonder

what it would feel like to devour god himself.

You forget that you are all chattering teeth and shaky breaths;

Your hands will never be able to properly hold onto the things you covet.

You are forever cursed to watch the cosmos bleed away from you through the cracks of your fingers,

But still you try anyway.

You keep trying because there is no alternative,

No world in which things work out.

That door has been closed to you forever.

(What do you want?)

You wanted to be wanted—so you clung to them—

Draped heavily against a body that didn’t want you, pleading:

‘Tell me what to do! Whatever you say; I’ll kneel and worship at the devil’s door if it means you’ll hold me for a minute more.’

(What do you want?)

You wanted a body that worked,

And you wanted it with a desperation you didn’t know your poor heart possessed.

You wanted a body—

Somebody—

A warm pair of hands to wrap around you and keep your cracked frame from breaking apart at night,

Soft lips that told you only good things and made you forget your faraway dreams and calloused hands.

(Surely, that’s not too much to ask?)

No. For you, every ask is too much—nothing you want can fit into your frail meatsuit.

You wanted to be made whole, to be absolved, to be clean—

(You are not dirty, you are not dirty, you are not dirty).

You wanted God with a capital G,

An entity that could put your shattered pieces back together

Or at least someone you could build an alter to and offer prayers you knew would be heard.

you wanted all of this, and more,

and the tragedy is—you still do, but you ask for too much, and you cannot have God.