Post with 2 notes
I can’t do this to myself anymore. I’m done. Beyond done. I deleted your number and all our old conversations. I’m shaking. I’m hysterical. I’m finished. You’ve treated me with impressive carelessness, and I’ve sat, shamefaced, allowing it to go on. Why? Because I thought I deserved it. Because I know I’m not perfect all the time, that some degree of nastiness is merely human. Even as you crossed every line I set, I still told myself I was overreacting, that I just needed to give you time. Done. I’m not going to sit and simper by your side, sit and reaffirm every good thing you’ve ever thought about yourself—please, read this and weep. I am done. I am leaving. I won’t come back.
Post with 6 notes
I’m sorry I never could tell you about the boy two summers ago, the one that used my hair like a steering wheel, my naivety like an open gate. It would have explained that night in your basement perfectly. I’m sorry I couldn’t kiss you. It wasn’t your fault. I’m still bruised in places your eyes are too distinguished to check. I used to love the fact that you could profess affection for me despite a criminally incomplete rendering of who I’d been. Now, the thought makes me sad. And I’m sorry about the sadness too.
Post with 2 notes
Should have known: a boy first loved at a bonfire can only burn. Should have seen the matches slipped behind your ears, should have run from the lighter when you first tossed it my way. I should have taken the third-degree burns along your protruding collar bones as a warning flare, that this boy refuses to run, even when the flame licks your skin. That this boy refuses to move at all, actually—not for burning buildings, and certainly not for me, a creature of wind. See, I thought my fingers were streams, so I could cool your sparks before anything came of it. But I’m no dancer, not graceful, and I resemble no body of water the world has seen yet. Do you remember the night we sat outside for hours? It was freezing, and you told me you couldn’t feel my hands at all. I get it now: I’m insubstantial. Incomplete. I don’t edge and claw and scramble like you; I just sweep from one empty spot to another. Erode. Flee. Still, though, I see greater disasters looming under your skin. There is a creature hiding beneath your sternum, catching your scalloped ribs into the building inferno, one after another. This flaming thing rages and lurches and pines, never quite gets to its goals. I think I see something of my weakness reflected in its steely gaze.
Post with 7 notes
There are wounds along my spine, notches my fingers cannot reach. There is something jagged in my smile. It slashes my lips every chance it gets. There’s a tear drop stuck in my sternum, and I hear it slosh aimlessly whenever you enter the room, your skin unbroken like it was the day of your birth. Your gaze childishly inquiring, never demanding. You see the broken glass along my collarbone and come to cauterize the wound, but you stop just inches away. My marrow is a treat. My shoulders simper. My ribcage hums. What is broken remains beautiful—I learned this lesson the first time your fingers drew blood from my breastbone. You have not learned, you never do. My eyelids flutter like bees. They would love to sting you. Even my bruises are weapons, striking at your most stabilizing belief: I cannot touch you. There’s a tint to my skin that sings of damnation, and your stop-start brand of salvation holds no healing powers.
Post with 3 notes
—and all your flattering intentions aren’t enough to compensate for that mercurial temperament, the way you go from stilted to steaming and back again with no pause in between, no intermission, just undiluted personality spread liberally over my observer’s eyes. A dead man once said that if you stare long enough into the abyss, it stares into you: darling, you are my abyss, and I could watch you endlessly, you and your spitfire comments and thinthinthin wrists, the quiet femininity your best efforts have never quite dulled, you and the stop-now, hair-trigger turns of your impossibly quick mind, the sparks layered insidious and tempting in each of your well-chosen words. Darling, darling, I could love you, if only I could survive the cataclysms stirred into being in the air around you, the fire trailing those lovely wrists, that sweet skin. You lean in with your trailing curls, scent sharp like cinnamon, with your lips impossibly close to my cheek. Stay tonight, you whisper, and, like the moth drawn to the flame, I do.
Post with 2 notes
I wonder what I’d have if you left me today. What would be left of us if we both left, ditched this too-quiet town for a brighter horizon. I wonder if you could measure emotion, put a number on my love versus yours. It’s become unsatisfactory to just say that I love you more—the entire world seems to be aware of that at this point, darling. I wonder if you could break my heart. Do hearts even break? I find mysteries left in just about every place you’ve been. And I wonder almost constantly if happiness is achievable, or if it’s more like perfection—a bar that raises every time you approach. I wonder if your hands will ever feel wrong when they hold mine. I wonder what it means to grow into another person. But really, I wonder what kind of fortuitous circumstances arose to grant me you, how I, of all the undeserving people on this earth, became blessed enough to hold your hand and present you as mine.
Post with 4 notes
I’ve been informed that you are going to break my heart, you know, by just about everyone. Your best friend and mine. Our favorite high school teacher, concerned for my rapid withdrawal from academics. Even your motherfucking sister mentioned it to me, that first night at your house. She stood outside with her spine ramrod straight, tensed against the brick wall in preparation for some unknown combatant, when I came to sit on the steps. She said it and left, just a quick line—“He’s going to break your heart.” I didn’t even have time to give my normal response. “Fuck it, I know.”
And that’s where you found me twenty minutes later, remember? It was January and freezing, but I hadn’t even noticed. You sat next to me, close enough that we almost touched, but with definitive room left between us. I was too afraid to bridge the gap and you didn’t seem to know it was there. You made some insipid joke about your parents’ overwhelming alcohol consumption and I didn’t reply, obsessed with the notion of my impending heartbreak. I couldn’t believe it then, even as I swore myself prepared for the probability. You were so sweet, despite your self-imposed distance, your carefully cultivated ignorance.
That was when I turned to you, my eyes singing an invitation that my nerves declared irresponsible. You turned back. The two of us sat there for moments, our mutual interest suspended in the frigid air. I couldn’t bring myself to move any closer, not if I wanted to lay my doubts to rest—it seemed to be that if you had the initiative to place your lips on mine, we could make this crazy relationship work, somehow.
You moved no closer. I was equally guilty of preserving the distance, of disallowing the possibility of success, but I learned something from that night, all those months ago. You will break my heart, unlike any of your predecessors, but nonetheless, I will stay by your side. I hope and hope and hope that you will lean in and prove your affection, preparing for the inevitable let-down when night after night, I leave alone.
Post with 14 notes
funny how passion stains your mind
but not your skin, that the emotions read clearly
in your words
are not pressed cleanly on your face,
not the way i expected them to be when i first
encountered
romance,
the mythical harbinger of doom, how
nothing stings as sweetly of fate
as i hoped.
know that the pass of your hand
across my hipbone
is not a fairytale,
that universes do not spring
into life behind each kiss pressed
hesitantly
to the curve of my shoulder,
but you are the physical manifestation
of so many childhood wants—
wide smile, steady hands, and
undeniable intellect.
it has taken some adjustment,
but i would quite like you to stay
now
and always.
Post with 5 notes
I swore I had risen above the insipid crushes of years long past, but now there’s you, and I find myself blushing at all the most inopportune moments, cheeks scarlet and eyes wide, completely intent on your presence in a way more profound than I had ever expected. And you’re certainly a looker with your tawny hair and striking jaw, the way your hipbone rises to create a line against your jeans, how I feel your gaze as it sits hot and heavy on the slant of my collarbone. You can sit and tilt your head in my direction, and that’s all it takes for me to feel like I’m soaring above the petty concerns of the past few years, sitting on the tip-top of a rollercoaster with some mysterious happy ending ahead—if I can just tip us past this strange deliberation, this murderous hesitance, then we will be storybook-fantastic, then I will throw myself into the inferno of your stone-cold palms, your grazing eyelashes, all these sights and sensations I disregarded ages ago. You are a magnetic combination of debilitating intelligence and cool eyes and steady hands, and I would like to spend the rest of my years mapping the dips and dimples of your enigmatic form.
Post with 1 note
Find me beneath star-fire lighting, where the tawny brown of your hair will shine like you were born to; we can discard competence and efficiency and the clean-cut lines of this unimaginative universe in favor of Crayola centuries, drawing out each moment in a miasma of reds and yellows and corals. You are an implosion in any space, any place, but tonight, you are magical. You’ve pushed your brilliance to the surface of your skin so that it emits a light glow, and I am speechless from the effort to be your equal, to deserve you. Do you remember that morning before the Psych exam? It was three fucking A.M. when you finally said something worth hearing; the phone was pressed to my ear so tightly the skin puckered around it. “S,” you told me, “I think you might be a different type of girl than I’m used to.” I giggled. “I am, but you’re a fast learner.” And that you are. You are the smartest person I’ve ever known, you and your snap-close mind, gathering up facts and carting them around incessantly. You missed two questions in that Psych exam and whined about both of them for two weeks. Darling, eight months ago, I knew you as that strange smart kid with the fantastic eyes, and our many encounters in recent times have changed none of the above. I hope they never do. Perhaps I mock the near-feminine slant of your eyelashes or the high-strung exactitude of your flawless mind, but really, every piece of you is perfect and entirely above reproach.
