The beginning of a dream I want to remember

but why is it so quiet? Why am I always waiting for something? It scares me that I need a tragedy. That maybe I always will.

“I have always been tough. I have a will like steel. I am the nail and the hammer that hits it. I am the wolf. The lion. The last one standing. I do not cry in public, complain when I am hurt, or give up. I push harder. I am a fighter. But sickness? Sickness comes for you no matter how tough you are. I can try to ignore it, to push it away, but the truth is still there, hard and edgeless: I have lost something that cannot be recovered. There is something stubborn and unwelcome in my body, and it is stronger than my will. My illness is not a death sentence, at least not an immediate one. If all goes well, I have a lot more years ahead. The struggle now is to accept the dichotomy: to be sick and still be whole. To be sick and still be tough. To be sick, and maybe even to be tougher than I was before. Now I live side-by-side with the thing that hurts me. It is there when I laugh and kiss my boyfriend and write poetry. It is there when I take my pills, when my hair comes out in clumps, and when I can’t sleep from the pain. My sickness is there when I look in the mirror. It is not all that I am, but it is an inexorable part of me. I am finally beginning to accept that. Which is to say, I am learning to accept the world in all of its contradictions and live as best I can within them.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be… and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.

my social studies teacher once told us “human beings are the most selfish of all. even when someone dies, you shed tears only because they are no more around to provide you with whatever they had been for so long”

I’m never gonna wait that extra twenty minutes to text you back, and I’m never gonna play hard to get when I know your life has been hard enough already. When we all know everyone’s life has been hard enough already it’s hard to watch the game we make of love, like everyone’s playing checkers with their scars, saying checkmate whenever they get out without a broken heart. Just to be clear I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered there’s gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens for all of my flying parts.