The nicest thing I have ever written about you

When I was younger, maybe 16 or 17, I wrote letters that – in every sense – were love letters. Except smack in the middle was the sentence, “This isn’t a love letter or anything.” As if adding that sentence would somehow prevent me from any hurt or rejection that was coming my way. As if it would stop that person from running if they wanted to.

***

I told the man and his daughter sitting next to me on the airplane that I was crying for my dead friend.
I didn’t feel bad about it.

Sometimes we tell lies to make sense of it to ourselves. Sometimes we hurt others in the process.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Most of the time it does.

When does the lie stop being white? Does it stop being white if I tell him your name?
What about if I show him your picture?

***

I’ve written so many poems about this. About the running. Sometimes it’s about you, sometimes it’s about me. The way you took the love I shoved down your throat like a spoonful of cinnamon in the mouth. The way the fridge is full of leftovers that I forgot to eat and I still don’t know how to love myself properly. I’ve written poems that say I don’t want to be sad anymore. But I’m not. Not really.

***

I am enduring a large, very critical, period of personal growth and it is of great benefit that I must spend so much time on buses and trains. This leaves much room for self-reflection, for many thoughts to pass through – and I must do exactly that, let them pass through. While I am on the move, there is no question of where I need to be going, for I am on my way. In this headspace, I can assess myself with the same lens. I am in growth, so there need not be any questions or doubts about where I am headed, for I am on my way.

***

And then I wrote the nicest thing I have ever written about you.

You were,

“influential in developing my capacity to love.”

***

I’ve gotten much closer to the point where I can say,

“Hey, this is a big ol’ love letter.
This is a big ol’ confession of the heart.
I think you’re wonderful. I think you’re lovely.
I want to spend time with you. My days and my nights.
I think having you in my life is pretty awesome.
You are all the poetry I could ever need.”

And that’s it. It’s big. But I’m not going to pretend I don’t feel. You can handle it how you’d like to. But this is me. My love for you does not depend on you. This is my love for you, and how you respond is on you. But this is how I feel. This is the magnitude of it.

The same old fears

Life is like a puzzle and some days I feel nauseous and I just spew pieces all over the sidewalk. People start giving me looks, start having to walk around me. I apologize but I can’t clean it up. It might be all in my head, it might not, but I just have to wait until it makes sense. I just have to sit on this spoil until I can throw it out, or crack it and rebuild. Until I get one of those mornings where I can finish the puzzle with my eyes closed. Bless those mornings.

Don’t bless the mornings that feel like dead weight. Or the afternoons fraught with messages that pop up like landmines in your inbox. I’m struggling with the permanence of nothing. I’m talking about the way that everything changes but somehow things can still stick to you like a smell or a song.

I feel like I’m standing in a claustrophobic pile of frilly bridesmaids waiting for the bouquet to be thrown… but I’m really just standing under them waiting for one of their shoes to drop when they lunge for the stupid thing. What do I get if I catch the shoe?

Do I get happiness? Is that what this is? Take a deep breath. The shoe is about to drop.

You know when you get irrationally upset over something ridiculous like you order a coffee and you’re watching them pour it and they don’t fill it to the brim and it feels like a blister popped on the back of your throat. You’ve feel like you’ve been ripped off and you are in the mood for pity but nothing comes out of your mouth because the only one you’re really mad at is yourself, and deep down you know this.

Yes, emotions are a physical thing for me. They come with their own symptoms; some overlap and this wreaks havoc on my soul. This causes confusion of the mind. How do I know which feeling is causing this? I don’t know how to hold it down when my head is full of helium and busting through the ceiling. My lungs are filled with miniature balloons and someone is poking a needle through the spaces between my ribs. I wince and try to stay straight face like I just took eight shots of gin to the face and I’m pretending I’m not afraid of ten minutes from now.

I’m in a fish in a bowl and everyone that’s looking in is either a little worried, or a little confused. Okay fine, I am afraid of ten minutes from now. The gin is a bottle of hot wine and it’s bubbling in my stomach. Stop moving for a second and let it settle. Let the blood rush to all the edges. Breathe damnit. I’m in a fish bowl and you better not get too close because I’m about to shatter this thing and it’s going to hurt.

I don't like to say these things out loud

I hear myself saying I’m not that naive, saying I’m well aware, but you don’t hear me saying I’m that smart either. Sometimes I get home, close the door behind me and spontaneously combust. I don’t like to say these things out loud.

You’d think patterns would be proof enough. You’d think history would be both a lesson and a teacher. You’d think personal experience is all it takes. “She has to figure it out for herself.” Yes, but what kind of fool wouldn’t have figured it out by now? I can hear you all talking. Don’t think I don’t see what your eyes are saying. You can’t hide your disappointment.  

“You’re letting your emotions get in the way.” What if they are the way? What if they are my way?

Blow out all the candles. This is a pipedream on a track to the edge of nowhere. The doomed rock face on the island of your ambiguity. Oh sweet girl, sit on the floor and eat chocolate almonds until you feel sick. It’s okay to give in to temporary if it’s just temporarily. Acknowledge it, and notice when you’ve been giving in for a little longer than you should. It’s okay to get distracted, distractions can be oh so beautiful, but remember that’s all they are – distractions, not places to call home. You must keep moving, home is not here.

I hope my heart wakes up. Somewhere warm. I’m hoping it digs my mind out of the ditch. I’m anticipating the moment I’ll stop slipping down the hill for long enough to catch my footing. I keep holding my arms out like I’m walking blind, feeling for something. My gut is trying to crawl out of the woodwork. I can’t remember when I last had it. I can’t remember when I wasn’t always about to walk into something.

“Keep being patient. It will come.” I never stopped looking for it and maybe that’s what matters. Because my gut appeared as a pair of scissors under leaves of all the falling. Scissors to cut the blindfold off, and all the obstacles that were in my way were in my mind. I wonder why my dog won’t jump the boards in the hall when she could clear them with a foot to spare. I ask myself the same question. Don’t let fear make you forget the length of your legs and the strength of your bound. Jump baby jump. And don’t look so surprised when you make it.

“My skin soft against your rough
Your rough tough against the heart
I am only holding on for love
I can only see your watery eyes in the light
that peaks over my shoulder
We’re not crying but we will be soon

The room is always on fire
but this time it’s burning down
and I have to be the one to go

I’d swallow fire and my pride
For you
But the room is burning down
and I’m not asking you to dance this time

We’ll both make it out
and we’ll be tired and we’ll be happy
lying on the sidewalk outside
We’ll dance when we’ve learned how
and the room will always be burning
But we won’t have to leave”

Have you slept lately?

Turn down the bed. Lay your suffering down on the mattress and tuck it in for tonight. Tuck me in and sing to me. I need you to say the right thing tonight. I need to hear your care. Your arms are what I'm fighting with, but I don't want to be like this. Know this – and tell me to stop. Tell me you won't allow it. I'm a glass of spilled milk and I've been sitting out all night. I'm sour and achey and I need a place to lie down.

I'm sorry. Shit. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know the monster that I am when I pick up the phone. You only hold out your hands, you only try and try, and I don't understand why you aren't better. It's not fair and I'm so sorry because how can I expect this from you when anyone could see that half the time I’m just a human fire – no, this is not a good thing. A quarter of the time I'm loose stitching and the final quarter I'm all-cylinders-firing mania. How do you deal with me? How do you love me without blood. Without tears. Oh. It's not without tears – or blood. Right. I’m sorry again.

Misery loves company and I'll sit here all day in your sadness because it's different than my own.

I wish I could keep my mouth shut. I wish I would remind myself that you don't owe me your ears, that my expectation is just mean, that I blame the blood in my head for making me cruel sometimes. You’ve tried to tell me this before and I don’t blame you. I try so hard to be appropriately defensive, but not so much that it looks like I actually think you might have a point.

I do, by the way, think you are right sometimes.

I just want to wrestle the words from my throat so badly in those moments that I end up with a handful of my vocal chords and silence. I'm always hiding under clothing racks from my younger self – the round ones in department stores with sweaters like the ones I always steal from you. I hide from my current self at times too. I don’t know if I can ask this of you, but please don’t ever stop looking for me. I promise I’m working on this. I promise that one day you won’t find me feet up in the last fitting room on the left.

Know that I appreciate your patience and your ears and I love your heart so much that I modelled my own after it. Know that I have the passion I do because of you. I have his stubbornness, there’s no denying this, but I use it for my determination to pursue love rather than logic. And he loves you, so I hope he can appreciate this, even if he can't understand it. You taught me to stand with that notion.

My burdens shouldn’t weigh on your tired eyes. There’s no sense in the both of us trying to carry this. I worry about you too, you know. Have you slept lately? Please, I love you, get some sleep. You want to know how I’m doing, but I need to hear anything other than my own voice tonight. Please don’t worry so much. I will be better in the morning.

Indigo is sold out of bookends

My father is standing in a field of poppies
and I am weeping under a tree
The field is a photograph and the tree is nothing
Forgive me I’m a little lightheaded
and it’s just that I am weeping
and the poppies won’t bloom for me

The tide is coming in faster than I can walk back to the house
and when I look up at the sky I can’t see blue
I usually bring my umbrella with me
when I know it’s supposed to rain in the afternoon
but today the rain came in the form of a bus
at 6am while I was still lying in bed

My bookshelf is top heavy and reeks of poetry
The kind that smells like warm skin
and Monday evenings spent wearing headphones
My bookshelf is missing a bookend
and I keep loading books on one edge
wondering why they tumble off the other

My chest stings in the way that I imagine peeling
dry cement from your skin feels like
I’m pumping fresh blood into my veins
and staring as it pours out of the open wound in my foot
My metaphorically bloody foot is in my mouth and
I’m choking on all the reasons why I can’t just buy a new bookend

And today it was not supposed to rain
but there was a nail tacked in the wall
that’s fallen on the carpet that I’ve stepped on
and there’s blood on my foot again and now I’m weeping
under nothing but an empty hole in the wall where
a photograph of my father standing in a field of poppies used to be

A letter to you. And a letter to me.

Become big
Become as big as you need to be
as big as you can
You will never be too big
too much

Light yourself on fire
Don’t worry about the flames
the burning or the ash
Don’t worry about being too hot
or burning out
Ignore the smoke alarms
Ignore the paramedics when they come

Become everything you want to be
even when you have no idea who that is
If you don’t like what someone tells you about yourself
Don’t believe it
If someone tells you that you know what you want
and you don’t think you do
Don’t believe them
And keep trying to figure it out yourself

Don’t be too proud
Don’t forget to be grateful
Don’t forget to appreciate the good ones
Let them inspire you

Don't believe what you've always believed about love

Keep your word
Do as you say
Follow through with your actions
Words are lovely
but you need to show
that you mean what they say

Be unapologetic
I think that is one of my favourite words
Do it unapologetically
Be unapologetically yourself
Own the voice cracks
wear them like scars
you are only breaking open your beauty
They imply openness
courageousness

Don’t be afraid of yourself

Don’t shrink
Don’t stop growing
Not for anyone

At the end of the day
a fear of being too much
is really just a fear of being not enough
A fear of being too much
is just doing every desperate thing you can
in hopes you don’t have to experience
what it would be like to be not enough
See what I mean now
they are the same

This was a letter to you
until I realized it was also a letter to me
We are so different
until we are so similar

It's only for a few months

Some days have no sweetness to them. You can douse them in honey and they will still be black coffee and raw kale. The days you put the TV on mute in the background just so everything doesn't feel so static.

Some nights there is only unrest. Only tossing between ache and numbness. Ricocheting between stillness and hysteria. They bolted my balcony door shut and tell me it’s only for a few months. I have nightmares about what would happen if there was a fire – how could I jump if I needed to? They say that type of situation is unlikely, but they don’t know how flammable my life is.

The girl on my shoulder, I let her have the floor for a minute and immediately regret it. She starts shrieking in my ear for all the times I stayed level-headed when I could have detonated. She tells me she shot herself in the foot each time I swallowed my anger – she can’t wear shoes anymore. She tells me I almost killed her turning the scraps into gifts and handing them back to people like an offering. I try to interrupt her and she goes into a fit. Stop making excuses for treating everyone else with more humanity than yourself.

I want to throw myself into the puddle right here in this pothole. Strip down my wet clothes in the middle of the street, drop them at your feet, and walk away. I could hang sheets and shirts from windowsills and watch the storms shred them. I need a road trip where I can stop in diners to dump the crumbs of myself on empty plates. The crumbs that collected in a messy pile in the back of the toaster tray. The bits of me that I forgot about, lost track of time with, and let char.

When the mailman walks by, I want to slip my notebooks in his bag and let him deliver them to strangers. I hope he delivers one to you, and if you don’t cry, I will. I want to put my hands on a plane and crash them into the side of a mountain. I want to leave my skin out to dry and half-heartedly go back to check on it and then pretend to be surprised when it’s gone. I want to sit in the back corner of a coffee shop and put my life on time-lapse. I want the moment you come in and sit down at the table to slip by in a blur of espresso and almond milk.

These are all metaphors for the ways I don’t want you to know me anymore.

Sometimes you want something to make sense so desperately that you trip a switch in your brain. Sometimes you can lose yourself trying not to be unlosable. Sometimes you need to run away from where you think the answer is to find out there is no answer.

I think about the time I ran away from home on the coldest night of the year. It was too cold to cry and the only way my muscles wouldn’t freeze was to keep running. I could feel my pulse everywhere. I made it 3 miles before my dad picked me up in the car. I think about that every time it starts getting colder out. Except now it’s your heartbeat that I feel in my feet. You told me to write about that. I don’t think this is what you meant.

My love tries to sell you a mixtape

I got a head start on my loving young. 10-year-old me left notes on desks in pink gel pen. 13-year-old me refused to send a messenger to ask a boy to dance, she could do it herself. After all, it’d be harder for him to say no to someone’s face right. Wrong, apparently. He left his dancing shoes at home.

16-year-old me unhooks trailers from cars in the pouring rain and drives them without her license just to talk to boys who don’t really want to talk at all. 21-year-old me drives way too fast and way too far at midnight only to be misunderstood. 22-year-old me pretends she has tickets to invite a boy to a thing and plans to buy them if he says yes. 23-year-old me pretends this too (because it worked so well the first time). 22-year-old me and 23-year-old me never bought them. 24-year-old me acknowledges they were indeed boys, not men, and she should have bought the tickets and gone herself.

But what can I say, I like to climb out on limbs. I never learned when my brother fell out of a tree, that maybe it’s dangerous, that you might break your arm – or worse. Maybe I just have a little too much confidence in my climbing. Maybe I’m not afraid of breaking something because I know, or I’m pretty sure, I’ll heal. Or maybe I’m terrified, but I still think vulnerability is necessary.

The romantic in me never wants to die. She can live without sunlight for months and survives on the little water that comes only from the tears that don’t make it out the ducts.

I really should be more careful though. I’d be wise to stop taking the hits without asking questions. There’s metaphorical callouses on my heart’s hands from holding on so tight to things that never wanted to stay. Why do we never want to let go of anything?

We can’t keep being this weak for each other. I need to take a hiatus from you the way I do with peanut butter sometimes. Go cold turkey just in time for thanksgiving.

I gotta clear my head. Go for a run. It’s a good time of year for it. It feels constructive, even though I’m dripping bad thoughts like oil and leaving a trail of decay around the city. I know it’s getting dark and hard to follow, but don’t worry I’ve run with my terrors before. Still, trail or not, you’ll never know where I’ve been.

I'm in the forest and you're the wolf. It's a manhunt and I'm sprinting because I can’t climb fast enough. Trying not to trip over your compliments.

It’s a family reunion of my fears out here – someone calls me sweet pea and I cringe. Sweet peas like grandma serves but cringe like the baked beans my father used to make me choke down before I could leave the table. I wouldn't go near one for a decade after that.

I wonder if that happens with people sometimes. Like something triggers; a traumatic experience, a moment of disgust, and suddenly we’ve sworn off them for good.

What happens next? Yes, I’m talking to myself, girl with resting heart rate through the roof, what else do you have to give? Everyone’s been taking so much lately. Even my tea took the top layer from my tongue.

A handsome stranger – self-professed, but I’ll oblige – gives me more in five minutes than I’ve been able to get from anyone, including myself, all week. He draws me out of the forest. He had me pegged by the boots and I’m reminded yet again that my heart will never not be on my sleeve. I thank him for handing back the hope I dropped and continue with my day.

My love. My love sticks out like a sore thumb. My love jumps from rooftops and spills hot coffee on your shoes. My love has no shame. My love tries to sell you a mixtape on the street corner but looks bashfully at her feet when you take it. My love doesn’t want your money. My love goes to bed on an empty stomach every night. I love my love, I do. It’s just, sometimes I would like to know what it feels like to wake up with some love left in me.

“You, wonder of my seventh world
The weather has been beating at the windows all summer
trying to throw tsunamis on all the burning
The sky that we are under claps
It can’t make up its mind

Me, in the sixth world
I’m walking around the city talking to strangers
asking if they’ve had enough love today
There are metaphors splitting through sidewalks like weeds
Nobody ever asks back

I stay in the car ten more seconds before I go inside
To swallow all the love that went unnoticed today
choke it down with a half empty water bottle
I think it feels like drowning in your apathy
but I am just growing gills”

I am the only girl awake tonight

Tell me, what does it mean to be afraid of your own heart?

I’ve got a friend in sales who tells me she can always tell a call will convert when she asks, “How are you?” and they ask her back. My jaw tightens because these perfect strangers on the phone are asking my friend about her day, and I can only remember all the times you didn’t ask me.  

Teach me how to cut you off at the knees with the same precision that I cut the stems off the sunflowers I bought myself. Yes, I know I’m scary in the way that I’m always one decision away from something you can’t control, but I’m still soft. I’m still human.

Lately I’ve been so human in hopes someone will treat me like one. Lately I’ve been so soft that I rot. Indifference is a foreign concept, but sometimes it shows up and slides in as a placeholder on the days my rot needs to stay in bed.  

I found something I wrote that says, “For apathy, take a good dose of memory and it’ll remind you there are things that you care about.” It’s too easy to mock the mood I must have been in when I wrote this. Perhaps it's half true – but we all know that a good dose of anything can be fatal. And a dose that’s just right is transient. Maybe when someone yells that you are temporary, it takes you about as long to believe them, as it takes you to throw out the pistachio bag of memories in the backseat. For transparency, I let that bag sit there tucked under the passenger seat for much longer than I’d like to admit.

You see, my head is just stuck and I’ve been mumbling Closing Time everyday after work for the past two months. “You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.” I can’t stay here. I know who I want to take me home, and it's not you. It's a blonde girl with a heart the size of the sun and she’s begging me to let her be nice to me. Self-love often feels like an uphill battle.

I have a document I am always adding to that’s titled, “silly things that I felt weren’t silly at the time.” Stupid is probably a more accurate word than silly, but I was trying to be nicer to myself the day I named it. Most of the things on those pages I can smile at now. Some still feel like needles.

There are so many kinds of love. There’s the kind you share sitting around a campfire with good friends and a guitar. It’s wonderful, but I don’t know when the night is over if you’re supposed to put out the fire or just let it burn out? Which is less painful? There’s the kind you feel draining from you as you drive away from someone and keep looking in the rearview mirror. There’s the good dangerous kind that takes over your whole body and turns you into a sugary tenderness. The one where the boy knew it, knew you were hungry for love, and under June moonlight he took the tenderness, melted it down and fed it to you in spoonful’s. Then there’s the bad dangerous kind, the one that turns your reflection into a monster. The one that makes you search WebMD for reasons why you’re nauseous all the time. Sometimes, all these kinds of love can be felt simultaneously. 

The other day was a well-timed concurrent nod. The one you exchange when it’s raining and you forgot your umbrella and you walk past someone else who forgot theirs too. The one you give when you’re standing next to someone else in the get-well section of the card aisle. The other day was last Sunday realizing we’re all in the same boat and nobody can figure out how to stop it from sinking. The radio is screaming quit playing games with my heart and I’m looking the other way. Somewhere somebody is shaking their head. Tell me, how do you write yourself into the poem where the girl finally takes her own advice?

“There are some things in life you just can’t put down:
a good book, a good love,
a cute puppy, a cute baby,
your foot, your phone,
a pen, a weapon – if that weapon is a lover’s heart
and everyone is screaming at you to drop it.
Surrender
– but even the white flag reminds you of them.”

A postcard from the back of September

I wonder if you remember that moment the same way I do.
I’m not even sure I know which moment I’m talking about. All of them probably.

Sometimes my memory is a filmstrip of negatives and I’m twelve years old again at my friend’s birthday party at the movie theatre. I’m standing in the projection room running my finger along the timeline. How did I end up here? There’s some beauty in it, but there’s also a lot of oily fingerprints that I’m not sure what to do about.

Like yesterday, you showed up in my peripherals, just for one frame of a moment, and suddenly it’s like the damn sandbags are made of styrofoam peanuts and my care is scattered everywhere. I’m a PEZ dispenser of love and you’re a kid on Halloween. We’re both too old for this and I refuse to dress up as something I’m not, even if it sounds fun. Even if we’re hungry.

The last time we talked, I played a game of dizzy bat on the way home. I woke up disoriented and after that I didn’t think you’d look the same. The next time I saw you though, it was myself I didn’t recognize.

If I were still standing in that projection room, I’d probably take a lighter to the filmstrip. It’s funny how life puts you in certain places that feel like burning, but in some way it’s a form of protection. Sometimes when you think your life is a cross between a satire and a tragedy, it’s really just a little tired from dodging the buses you keep stepping out in front of. You should check the lock on the door and get some sleep tonight. You should help it out a little and wait one more second before you step off the curb.

I keep reminding myself that I’ll never get my synchronistic moments if I never leave my apartment. Life is a little bit of luck sure, but I’ll never see the foggy Boston morning if I don’t take off the cinder block boots and get in the car. I can’t have answers until I ask questions. So I ask them – even if I roll around on the carpet after I hit send. Who cares about the answers – at least I know I did everything I could have done.

So what do you do when the questions you ask are normally a golf tee for failure? But then you ask the guy what’s his favourite kiss with you? And he pauses to think, and then says something like, “That’s easy, the next one.” He says it so matter-of-factly that you want to melt into the pavement like it’s high July even though it’s the back of September. Do you keep asking them? Is it safe now?

Did you outlive limbo and barrel over the edge only to find you weren’t at the peak yet? How long should you rejoice in the downhill before you lose momentum and start climbing again? These are the questions I like to hang like postcards around my room.

So put on your softest white t-shirt and crawl into bed tonight. Pull the sheets over your bare hips because you are all the warmth you need. You can answer the questions in the morning. You asked them, and for that, you can be proud.

Wait, one more thing – you know how you can’t fall asleep if you think you might have left the door unlocked? I just need to answer one of the questions before I close my eyes. I whisper out loud; I know you don’t remember anything like I do.