A Collection Of Words

Say there are miracles only I can perform...Say the body is the algebraic precision of prayer. Say 'God' if it suits you and hear your own name echoing back.

Do you know sometimes, when gathering nectar, bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish are so sensitive snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land on the water? Do you know whales will follow their injured friends to shore, often taking their own lives so to not let a loved ones be alone when they die? None of this is poetry. It is just the earth being who she is, in spite of us putting barcodes on the sea...We need so much less than we take. We owe so much more than we give.

Don't be the first to destroy something just because you don't trust that it's real. Give up this idea that nobody can know you and still love you.

An emotionally unavailable man is the blank canvas that I’m most comfortable with. He won’t get close enough for us to see each other....I thought if he didn’t see me, I wasn’t worth looking for. But I didn’t even know him. I didn’t know myself.

Always leave a simple task undone on your to-do list. This way, even when you are at your worst, even when you are barely human, even when you are failure with a mouth, there will still be something you can accomplish.

But heaven -- that wasn't what you were aiming for. You didn't think the other side would be better. You thought the other side would be nothing at all. Imagine choosing nothing at all. Imagine something hurting that bad.

Being this sad all the time is really hard. No one wants to develop my negatives in their darkroom...I will break my own heart clean in half before my lover even cracks it. I want him to know that he is made of glue, and love is a terrifying beast. I hate when people pretend that something is what it is not. When they pretend watching me implode is love. It's not love, it's a spectacle. I don't want to be a spectacle anymore.

On our first date, he ran his fingertips across my skin like he was reading my palm. And this is the hardest part: that boy is not made of fists. That boy learned how to braid my hair. And these things do not untruth themselves when the first door slams. And I did not stop loving him all the months I was holding my breath. And this is the hardest part: the way a fish is still a fish even after she’s been gutted.

Praise the trench that taught you about darkness, and praise the day you danced in the light...Praise your mouth - your wide open mouth for how confessional it is. Your straight back, your unbowed head. Praise the atoms and cells that make your body cathedral, and praise the otherworldly algorithm that is your heart. Especially that. Revolution is the sound of your heart still beating.

If I could tell my then self something now, I would tell him that the wolves in the woods sometimes make halos to better hold us. And sometimes, the wolf makes halos that we might be better held. I would tell my then self that it is very possible for a person to be loved and yet still feel so alone that they just have to leave.

I'm not scared to die, I just don't want it to hurt. I bet the biggest misconception about death is that we won't care anymore. I will never not love you. Trying to hide the absence of your love is a mathematical impossibility. You were the year I wished my life on other people. Magnets are incapable of lying. Darkness is redundant, I wanted us to be the truth.

Your boy starts each message off "okay, hi mom, I love and miss you"...This lasts only a few seconds, a minute tops, before he starts a jarring sequence of words that demand you go a little more crazy to understand him. And you have to refuse because you need to stay here. You have four other children. You don't want to be what he inherited from you, and isn't that the worst thing you have ever written?

So if she chooses to wash away the blood in the bottle of liquor or the bottom of the bath, I will still call my sister holy.

For the people who always say too much without saying what they need to...for the ones that want to peel off their skin because they don't know how else to let anyone in

When I ask her what she loved about him, she says 'I know this is bad, but he was so terrible to me that I never ran out of things to write about.' I wonder if she wants a lover or a writing prompt. 'There is a certain high to hating yourself...'

Isn't the burden of proof on him? Isn't his anger followed by a chorus of 'show me, show me, show me,'? Isn't a body never enough? Didn't you need eye witnesses? Didn't you need video? Didn't he oblige? Didn't he plaster Facebook with videos of his skin being unraveled? Hasn't he watched himself die again and again and again because you asked? Because what part of that is supposed to make him want to live?

Ode to the surgeons. To the knives we wield deftly in our right hands and the sutures we made of our own mouths when nothing else could close the wound. To my first love and how I had to cut him out at 19. And again at 21. And again at 22...I marched through my own heart armed with nothing and came out the other side.