My dearest

I would blaspheme a thousand times

so that I may feel the sin of your love

For you

I would let the devil pummel me

until I am awash with pain

so that you may soothe my ache with your alizarin lips

My love

your eyes are brighter than a starfall shower

and I find that

I am like a weary traveler finding a blessed glade

and my devotion without crescendo

For you

We all long for love.

And at twenty, when you want love, but haven’t found it, you want to make it happen. You, unlovable you, could train someone else to love you. Has it always been this way? Were you always so hideous, so disgusting, that nobody has ever wanted you, even a little bit?

And there you go, practicing your smile in the mirror, wishing your teeth were whiter or more aligned. You wash your hair with the nice shampoo, and wear outfits you pulled off of mannequins, and spritz perfume so that someone walking past you on the street will fall in love with you and your scent for just a moment. You take a thousand pictures of the same moment and hate yourself in all of them, hating your posture, your smile, your hair. Wondering how anyone was supposed to love you when you were yourself.

And at twenty, maybe you haven’t found someone to love you yet, not in the way you want. And you keep practicing. You listen to your laugh, tame it, make it pleasing to the ear. You find funny jokes, clever lines, interesting facts so that you may one day be loved for your witty intellect. You pick a skill and practice, practice, practice until you are so good you can do it while you sleep, just so that you can pretend you are naturally gifted, and naturally impress.

And there you go, your smile dimmer, your laugh dulled, your words someone else’s thoughts so that maybe, in someone else’s eyes, you are someone worth loving. You are a perfectly practiced existence, waiting for love, any at all, to befall you.

But you are not a thing meant to simply exist. You are bright, and loving, and so full of life that flowers bloom where you step. Your love is not a performance, and you are not an actor. All you have to do is have faith that they will love you just the way you are. All you have to do is trust that they will want to stay with you. All you have to do is love.

And love is to rest.

The end of June has left me feeling numb

as nature grieves my loss in bitter rain,

yet still I wait for better days to come.

Their words to me are in a static hum.

I smile with feelings I am forced to feign.

The end of June has left me feeling numb.

Alone again, I hear the steady drum

of crying rain against the windowpane,

yet still I wait for better days to come.

They start to tell me off for being glum

like I have lost my right for feeling pain.

The end of June has left me feeling numb.

Despite its cloudy skies and anxious thrum,

my body beats against its tethered chain,

yet still I wait for better days to come.

Finally, my loss in the lives of some

just now becomes another blurry stain.

The end of June has left me feeling numb,

yet still I wait for better days to come.

The grass is always greener

Wherever I am not

Even when I build a bridge

It’s suddenly greener in the other spot

It used to make me whine

With a sneer upon my lips

How I’d leave to see the sun

And always end up seeing an eclipse

When I saw the frowns on the other side

I thought it might’ve been a mirror

Their grass looked so much greener

Yet they held my land much dearer

My grass looks much more yellow

But now I see it’s from the flowers—

Buttercups and daffodils

Blooming yellow at all hours

Why see the sun

Which blinds you in the eyes

When you could see an eclipse

Like a soft halo in the skies

The grass may be green

But it’s the daffodils I treasure

The cheery yellow petals

“Green” beyond measure

I keep all my memories in my memory pond. They fall in when they’ve been completed, like flowers that grew on trees, bloomed and passed and now just petals to remind you of what was. They swirl around; gently, peacefully, but coiled and tense, like a fish preparing to strike, rearing up when agitated.

My memory pond goes through the seasons. It’s winter when I sleep, when the pond is frozen over and the memories are halted. My dreams skate across my pond, carving themselves into the icy layer, to be thawed and melt away when I awake.

I remember in the fall. When it’s windy, it’s autumn, and my memories are stirred from sleep, the water coaxing them to the surface. Sometimes, my memories get trapped under rocks, and they tear away, leaving spaces in memories that I can’t seem to fill. Sometimes they mend themselves, sometimes they don’t.

The algae comes in the summer. It blooms, great and big and suffocating in my memory pond, trying to trap my memories beneath it. They sometimes break free, bursting forth but tainted green--tainted with algae, with envy, with anger, with love, with all-consuming emotions I can’t tame.

My memories come in the spring, when they rain into my memory pond, or blossom into flowers. Then my memory pond fills up, and I have more things to remember when it’s autumn again.

My memory pond is full of things, and I never lose a thing in it. Spring is the most common, fall the most important. Winter is the most whimsical, and summer the most powerful. I never forget a memory; it’s only tucked away under a rock in my memory pond, but it will come in time, and then I’ll remember in the fall.

You’d think that I’d stop falling

I mean, it’s really quite a hazard

but I can’t seem to stop tripping and falling

like I’m wearing clown shoes on two left feet

I think it’s gotten to the point

where I’m really just going cliff diving

and I must not have hit the water yet

because I think I’m only falling faster

This is the tallest cliff I’ve ever been on if that’s the case

so maybe I’m diving from Mount Everest

but I wonder when I’ll hit terminal velocity

or if I’ve just broken physics

Maybe I’m actually skydiving

from a really high-up plane

and I guess my parachute just doesn’t work

because it probably would’ve opened by now

I don’t think that I really mind

it’s actually pretty exhilarating

I feel like I’m flying

and my stomach is doing cool flips

even if the rest of me doesn’t have the talent

I think I must be in space

where there’s no oxygen or gravity

I mean, it makes the most sense

you’ve taken all my breath away

and I still haven’t stopped falling for you

I was in the waiting room. I was nervous. The walls were all white-- bright white. Uniform. Stark and crisp and clean. No crayon. No fingerprint smudges. No chipping or peeling. Just cold and white and perfectly ordinary. No blood. Blood? Whose blood? No, no blood.

The doors were wood, the light kind that showed its natural tiger stripes. The metal push bar that was cold and creaked and groaned when you pressed it, the ones you leaned your body into when your hands were full and it scratched your back through the fabric of your clothes because it was too heavy. The bright red exit sign floated above one of the doorways. Scarlet red. Blood red. Escape escape escape. No, just red. Exit.

The overhead lights were florescent. Too white. Unnatural. They left short black shadows all over the room, under eyes and lengthening noses and morphing faces. Under chairs where shadows danced to squeaky chair tunes. No, no dancing. It was still. The shadows didn’t dance. Dead shadows. Hospital shadows. Too much death in hospital shadows, hospital beds.

The chairs were blue. Dark blue. Dusty blue. Why always blue? Itchy, scratchy blue. Plastic armrests that were just as soft as the chair cushioning. They didn’t want to be sat in. I got up and sat and up and sit. Up and down and here and there and bitter free hospital coffee. Squeaky floors with scuff marks. Someone wanted to go. Time to go. No, not yet. Stay.

The plastic wrapped around the bouquet was crinkling. My palm was sweaty. Hot hot. Daisies and chrysanthemums and baby’s breath. Lots of flowers. Flowers for her when she comes back from surgery. She’s allergic to flowers. I didn’t tell them. No, she needs them. Flowers for her if she comes back. The stems were getting crushed. Wilting flowers. No, not the flowers, just the stems. Ugly bouquet.

I was waiting. Come out, come out wherever you are. No, don’t. Don’t come back. Hospitals are full of death. Hospitals are for the dead. Dead dead dead.

I grew up running. It meant everything. Track team. Ribbons. Medals. Trophies. Twisted ankles. Freedom. I built a life out of running. But no matter how good you get at running, or how much you love it, there are some things running can’t fix. You can’t run from yourself.

It stopped being everything.

First of all, books are misleading. I guess that's why they're called "fiction," but it isn't fair. You know what they tell you? First kisses send off fireworks. You know what there was none of for my first kiss? Fireworks. I mean, come on. I'm supposed to have some sort of chemical reaction when we kiss? Buddy, if that happens to you, you've got some whacky allergies and a lifelong aversion to making out with anyone, ever. No fireworks: good. Also, no fireworks: a little underwhelming.

Second of all, people don't look how they're described in books. No one was looking at me with smoldering eyes, okay? I wasn't trying to kiss the sun. No one is staring from my eyes to my lips to my eyes to my lips to my eyes. I don't have the patience for that. You don't have the patience for that. It's not pinball with eyes, and for all I know, he could've been looking at my nose. People don't have "perfectly mussed hair" unless that's called bedhead, which by definition disqualifies it. My eyeliner wings were not perfectly straight because my Instagram is of a regular person and I don't know how to apply makeup. Also, my hand shakes when I'm nervous, and eyeliner is very close to my eyeball. I had some acne on my forehead and no one ever puts that in their books, I'll tell you that.

Third of all, no one really knows what they're doing during their first kiss. Not gonna lie, my first kiss was kind of disgusting. It was messy. His tongue was anywhere but inside of my mouth, not that it felt like he was licking my face, but it was undeniably wet afterwards. I think I was so nervous that I made more saliva because honestly, kisses are just really, really messy. My breath probably smelled horrible because we had just eaten but there is no way I am sacrificing good tasting food for a kiss. Luckily, I didn't bite him, but our teeth accidentally knocked together a couple of times and I really wasn't sure if I was supposed to offset our mouths so I could suck on his bottom lip like books said was sexy (honestly, so untrustworthy and a terrible guidebook), so I didn't. What do tongues do in kisses? Ours touched, I guess, and my tongue was sometimes in his mouth and his tongue was sometimes in my mouth, but one time his tongue was in my mouth and I closed my lips around it and it was overall a 0/10 experience. I was still breathing through my nose, is that weird? Books always go on about how the couple had to break for air, but your faces are probably already warm so would you really be bothered by the person you're kissing breathing? Are you not supposed to French kiss for your first kiss? Is it meant to be chaste and closed-mouth? Whoops, missed that memo.

Fourth of all, books are misleading, but they aren't entirely wrong because for some inexplicable reason, I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him closer and couldn't resist kissing him again.