Hiraeth

I don't want to write here anymore, it feels to much like being a ghost and I want to be alive, or at least try to.

I wish love treats you well and if it doesn't then I guess I'll be here to pick up the pieces, if you ever feel like reaching out.

He brushes his teeth every night before he sleeps and he doesn't like to have breakfast in bed but he does when I stay over. These are routines.

He puts his mouth over my clavicles and bites down. He whispers beautiful nothings over my bones and holds me in his arms and never drifts too far apart over the night.

It is all so tender I almost feel guilty when I have nightmares in his bed.

I don't expect you to understand this because I don't think you've ever been through it.

I think he cares and I care too, so I try.

He sees me and asks if I lost weight, he notices these things, says: are you eating well enough? And cooks that soup I mentioned I liked months ago.

He says I don't have to have sex with him if I don't want to, says we can just have dinner, says I can just sleep in his bed. He wants to be my friend and he keeps his word and he asks how I am every day.

And I lie through my teeth because I don't tell him the nightmares are back. Because when he first met me I was all nightmares and staring into the distance and then I wasn't and now I am again.

And I know he notices and I know he cares. I know if I told him I can't sleep or eat or think he'll help. I know he wouldn't leave and wouldn't find someone else who wants to sleep with him and doesn't lose weight and doesn't wake up shaking so bad he can feel it in the bed. But you didn't and I keep dreaming about it. You promised never again and it's been a whole year since that time someone told me I looked sick and you didn't notice or you didn't care and then you left.

I had a whole life of tightly held control. Impulses and desires in my fists, indulging only a bit so I won't lose it.

When you grow up surrounded by addiction you either teach yourself to abstain or you give up.

And sometimes you only drink in drops and smoke second hand and think you've got it all figured out.

But you understand you're an addict only when you've been years clean but face trouble and still think of relapsing first thing.

I know you don't think of it as addiction, but I really want to hurt myself.

I believe if I open a hole big enough on my skin I'll bleed these nightmares out. And maybe I'll faint or maybe I'll sleep.

Dreamless and lax.

I woke up at four am two nights ago because I heard your voice in a dream, I was crying and shaking so hard my jaw was stuck and stiff the whole morning. Moon shaped bruises on my palms too, dents from my nails when all I could hear was you.

And last night, again, I was woken by chest pain. Couldn't understan why was it so hard to breathe at first. And I was so cold I couldn't go back to sleep. So I shook until sunlight came and then went about my day. My lips raw from all the biting.

I want to carve my legs with a razorblade and I want to burn my wrists.

You don't admit that you're an addict until you slowly see the signs of relapse. And I might just wake from a nightmare again tonight with a new scar to show in a couple of years when another man sees me naked. So just in case I'm already making up a story: I had an accident while moving furniture or I got drunk with a couple of friends and fell off a chair. Something funny, something pretty. I won't be a creature made out of nightmares and cold, I'll be desirable and he'll love me and say I'm beautiful, and I won't think about how you couldn't do either of those things or how I couldn't make myself enough to keep you. I won't remember these nightmares so vividly then and I'll get to pretend this wasn't me.

rainy day, june got too cold too soon.

Warm meal and police officers at the door, I say you really know how to make me feel at home.

We burst into laughter walking down the road, and you'd probably ask how can we laugh right now, but we have no alternative.

My hands no longer hold razors or cigarettes and they can't let go. Instead, I'm holding tinier hands. This is what adult life looks like, right?

Memory torn between nows and thens and poems about growing up with angry men. "This call is being recorded" and carrying pepper spray. I say if our mum's have had your guts maybe we would've had a better chance at loving living laughing.

I had another dream about you,

another bathroom fluorescent lightining one

but this time my stomach hurt from laughter, not pills.

Your hands were holding my face, fingers over my cheekbones instead of down my throat.

We were kissing and smiling and not dying or screaming or fading.

So yeah, of course I woke up in the middle of a panic attack.

Sunday 5:50 sitting on my couch trying to breathe. Chest pounding, not christmas, not tusday, not 7:15. Still dark and cold outside, but not june just yet.

I don't smoke anymore, and I don't carve nightmares into my thighs as proof. I cook lunches in advance now and I work two shifts and I don't have time to lose it, so I don't.

Sunday, 7:30 AM, I have not lost perception of time and space.

I make breakfast for our friend's kid. I smile and dance in the kitchen but my hands shake so much I keep dropping stuff.

No one asks, no one has to.

I remember what you said in the dream and I remember your smile pushing me inside the bathroom. It's sunday 9:00 AM and my chest hurts so much I start coughing.

Your hands and my hands fit perfectly in the dream.

It's sunday 10 PM, last day of may.

she reads me well, she reads me so well. we've been friends through the worst of eachother so the least we should get out of it is a good literary analysis .

says don't you feel more like yourself when you're this angry? over the phone

says she was out of touch with this particular rage, but it feels so much more like who she is

sends me lyrics she wrote, verses and verses about being betrayed, about surrendering yourself to a dream life and then having nothing left, just the memory of who you were before trust screwed you over

she says she remembers when we were both mean and angry together and how untouchable it made her feel

don't you miss being the villan?

but the villan ends up touched and moved and torn up for nothing.

that is the line in which i'm not like her, never quite were. we shared the flames but i am the dragon of my own fairytale. have always been.

except when i played the princess for a while, painted myself rose-coloured and dreamed about castles and children and happily ever afters… what a waste of words, that half-assed romantic bullshit lies rotten on my phone notes.

i am the dragon, i was the whole time, locked you in my tower for years and forced you to agree "youlovemeyoulovemeyouloveme", like that could erase the fear i've always had of you. you, the knight in dark armour, slaugthering the monster, ripping me open, rightfully so.

i laid dormant for almost a whole year, i did. let you have the victory. cause you were the hero and i was the villain, so it was my role to play, playing dead. i stayed on the floor and didn't whimper or cried or moved. i stuck to the script, you run away with the princess and you tell everyone how you conquered love and defeated evil. and i play dead, i don't complain. that's how it was written.

that is until you wake the dragon. not with love, siken was wrong about that one. but you come and you poke it with a stick, hey look, hey look it's me. you have my attention, i'm watching. you show yourself and hide away, like a child playing. and you do other childish things and i know iknowiknowiknow this is how it stars. cause it started like this before. this is how it's written. you do some silly stuff and i get angry. and i reach out. and i set your life on fire and the flames catch my life too and we ruin it all.

we ruin it all and call it love. we let it conquer, think this is a diffent story cause we're special like that. we were never like the rest so you say you love the dragon, come willingly to the tower and we lock ourselves there. our friends watch with facination. then you run with the princess and i play dead all over again, right?

it always starts like that, she says, i've seen it before. she reads me so well. she sends me another song she wrote and i tell her i love it, she suggest i star singing again, says she could record me.

but to you, from you, through all this years, i asked only one thing. sometime past midnight, all that time ago, second year of highschool. sitting on my bed, hands shaking. i said all i want is for us to still be friends, and i said i needed you to promise me that no matter what we would still be friends. and you said ok (you said ok, you said ok). and i asked again, fifth year, drunk on someone else's house, holding my phone like a lifeline. i said i want us to try and be friends and you said we couldn't but stuck around anyway, haunted me, haunted me, haunted me. until i realised the ghost had been me all along, dissapearing time and time again. yet i asked once more, almost eighteen years old, can't remember when or where cause it's all fussy now, but i know i asked and i know the skin on my hands broke on the bathroom floor sometime after.

then you asked. you said you needed to know, you said you wanted nothing else, just to be there, to know and see and nothing else. so i gave you everything, every single thing i could i gave to you cause more than anything you were my best friend.

i know is hard to stay, i know, and i know you sometimes don't want me to exist or at least you act like you don't. but i thought maybe this was something we could agree about. you said it was what you wanted, about a year ago on a park, picking grass from the floor and crying and holding my hand. and something broke along the way but i thought... fuck, yeah i know it is foolish but i've been saying so many stupid things these past few days that i don't care about one more. i thought we were making progress towards that. i thought maybe this was something we could have.

and yeah, i admit i freaked out a bit the other night, but the nightmares were already there and i was tired and anxious and sick sick sick way before that. so there's no excuse really, nothing to say.

i never hid anything from you. never had a reason to. been as clear as i can be. nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to lie about. it's not about sparing feeling either, it's about living with the consequences of your decisions and letting the other live the consequences of theirs. my life is this, your life is that. so why did you feel the need to hide?

i know you're happy, i already said cookie cutter love and several instagram posts to prove it. here's one month and here's another month and here's something i used to call silly and used to say i didn't know how to do for you. don't worry, i think it's cute, i think you're growing.

and i thought you were growing last week too, thought it was maybe a step forward. i know we were never good at being friends, but you told me once that nobody understood the way i did and i told you nobody has ever known me like you. so being nothing sounds idiotic to me, sounds like something we also tried many many times and failed at. so for a foolish moment i thought here's us being acquaintances, being allowed to be a distant yet present part of eachothers life... i don't know why i thought about that.

i think i give you too much credit, to your growth and to your pride. i think i overthink because i spend too many hours awake. so now i'm writting this instead of taking a nap before i keep working, and putting it out there so i don't have to swallow this little rage that's bubbling inside me.

i think you're a coward. and i think i'm done playing the mature one or whatever i told our friends when they asked questions. no, i have nothing, not a single things i want to hide from you. and yes, i would have liked things to be different. but here's a cheer to modernity's tools and another one to doing the childish thing and giving up.