Did You Get My Telepathic Message?

It’s called dating.

Courting.

It’s so embarrassing if you want all the benefits of a relationships without making it official.

There is a strange grief

in outgrowing your tomb,

wanting to live

yet not knowing how-

in the midst of your ruin.

There is a dangerous comfort

in places where nothing grows.

No risk,

no failure,

No growth.

Just the quiet numbness

of staying as you are.

I am a flower in the dead of winter.

Not alive but unwilling to bloom.

It is safer

to sleep beneath the frost

than to risk the storm of spring.

Yearning to resurrect,

to bleed into new colours-

but knowing

a flower cannot bloom

in the shadows.

Winter leans close-

her cold hands are chains

coiled around my ankles,

Wailing:

„Stay, you are safe here.”

And I almost believe her.

Her cries bring me comfort

and shields me from new beginnings.

But it is witching hour

and there is a fever beneath my ribs,

a pulse that tastes like sunrise,

a faith that hums

in the spaces between old bones.

Forged in darkness,

baptized in sins-

I cannot unlearn.

Yet flowing, always flowing

toward mouths that thirst

for what I have never tasted.

Spring hears my silent prayer

And answers;

„There is no sin in wanting more”.

I realise the grave, my cage-

Has always been open.

It was I that denied myself life.

And so under the blue aura of the moon

I claw my way out of the grave-

toward the echo of Spring,

Toward a life of bloom and new.

Winter asks why I would leave

the grave that kept me warm.

I tell her,

I am a sinner of quiet desires.

I want to touch,

to taste,

to stumble through rooms

I was told to only dream of.

To experience something other

than the comfort of my decay.

I look back at my grave;

To become someone new

I must first shed the skin

I forged from stained glass and frostbite.

Oh how easy it would be

to go back to the chains I called home.

But in Springs warm embrace,

She whispers,

„Hibernation kept you alive

But it did not let you live.”

So I make a quiet agreement

with the thaw:

I will loosen my grip

on the coffin of who I was,

I will let the ice unlearn my name,

I will stand in the unbearable light

of a life that does not hurt me.

And when I finally step out

of Winter’s shadow,

I do not curse the cold.

I do not hate the grave.

How can I?

when it taught me

how to rise.

And now-

I draw the breath of life,

Lungs stinging with the ghost of winters kiss.

Let me be temporary,

But let me be felt.

To press my thawing petals

against the warmth of passing souls.

Let me be undone by presence,

To bloom,

without forgetting

where I withered.

And now I have arrived,

standing over my grave