Do you know what it’s like to look at the china afterwards? When the light catches the gilded edge? You scrape off dinner, and underneath are those little painted shells. You look at that flawless, bone-white plate or the dish with the rosebuds. You look at your hand-thrown bowls with the faux cracks buried beneath the glaze. It’s all broken, and you want nothing more than to shatter it. It’s ephemeral, and it’s permanent. The scalloped edges and the machine painted leaves. Every vessel stripped down and unable to do its job. No more containment. It’s haunting. That ephemeral dish sitting so permanent. Just reminding you. Once she was here. Once you ate your meals together. You shared this table. Her feet resting in your lap. You can see her hair fall across her eyes and her smile when you catch them. And you want to destroy every reminder. You want broken glass. The metallic flakes in the glaze scattered across the floor. Nowhere to put the food. Just the debris and the wreckage. Raw glass and glittering, sharp edges. And no more reminder. Just you and the broken pieces and the floor and the empty table and the empty house. And it’s not permanent. It’s ephemeral. And it’s gone.

When my mother dies, she leaves me her wings.

They are tawny, mottled things, three and a half feet long and with a wingspan of a little over seven feet, a bit too big for me. At the place where they connected to her back, little wires and metallic plates gleam, and these I focus on most. They are the only part of the wings not familiar to me, buried as they were in the muscle and sinew of her back. The Mortician has scrubbed them clean of bodily fluids, though I search them thoroughly. No part of my mother remains on the wings, and yet she is heavy on them like a scent.

Of course, her scent to has been scrubbed clean, too.

“You know,” says the mortician, handing them to me in a blue zippered bag, “You could get a good price for those.”

“I know,” I say, and I do. I heard the offers my mother got, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty, higher. And I watched as she shook her head and rejected lawyer after lawyer, even as the numbers they spoke called to mind the houses we could live in and the meals we could eat and the shiney new shoes we could buy. But my mother kept her wings, and we stayed in a series of ramshackle little homes and lived off of canned food and I could have poked pencil-leads through the worn rubber of my souls.

Things stabled out a bit before she died, but even so, she had nothing to leave me but these.

I suppose I should be grateful--there are people who would pay good money to be left a pair of wings in a will, knowing they might die long before the seller. My mother could have kept them her entire life and still been able to eat well and own a winter coat. But she left them for me, the one person who had nothing to offer for them.

Not even gratitude.

They say Sultans used to give white elephants to men they wanted to ruin; the gift couldn’t be turned down or killed and yet was too expensive to keep. I am sure my mother had some romantic notion in her head when she left her wings to me. If I bothered to look through her journals I am sure I would find pages of poetry about legacies and metaphors and dreams and wings. I am sure she never thought about how much it would cost to have them installed, or the time I would need to take off work for the procedure, or that I would need to re-buy half my wardrobe to accommodate them, and that it would take weeks to learn how to keep them folded, let alone how to fly.

I pop the wings into the trunk of my car and try to forget them there while I go about my life. I plan my mothers funeral, a small and cheap affair. I go to and from work, eat underwhelming food, spend some time with my friends and feel guilty when I leave early. I don’t sleep as much as I would like. I sometimes think with guilt of the wings, and I search the internet for buyers, and then I think of the way my mother would stubbornly shake her head at every suit-and-tie man who came to our door, and I close the webpage.

Her dying wish was for me to have them. Maybe she thought with more nostalgia than I did of the times I was small enough for her to carry with ease, and she would bring me to school high above the rooftops and the tiny moving figures that other people became from her vantage point. When I think of those times, I mostly remember the wind whistling sharp and cold, and the too-hard grip of her arm around my stomach. Every time we landed I was so caught up in gratitude for the return of solid ground beneath my feet that I barely felt her kiss my forehead or noticed the awe of other students.

Maybe my mother wanted me to get from them what she did. Maybe flying really was spectacular, freeing. But you cannot eat freedom.

Eventually, a respectful length of time after my mother’s obituary was published in our local newspaper, I receive a letter from a lawyer working on behalf of a businessman. He offers me his condolences, and then eighty-thousand dollars. I balk at the number--but then, most of those poor enough to accept smaller sums have likely already sold. According to the internet, his offer is not far from the going rate.

I meet the lawyer in a stuffy office and he slides me a check. I hand him the bulky wings, still in the blue bag.

“Crazy, how long she held onto ’em,” he says, once he’s inspected them.

I shrug.

“Most folks they did the first experiments on were druggies, you know? Sold the wings the minute they were offered enough for their next fix. Guess your mom got clean?”

“Something like that,” I say. Of course, most of her sobriety was the result of depleted funds, not any genuine desire. She loved the high of flying more than the other kinds, at least. I suppose that was something to be glad of.

“Well, good for her.” I nod and smile.

We shake hands and he gets on the phone with his client, and as he zips the bag up I have one last glimpse of a white-brown feather. For a moment, I find myself thinking back to that feeling of the wind in my face, my mother’s mouth next to my ear as she points to all the familiar buildings below, and we play a game of guessing which is which. Her wingbeats made a comforting sound, and her arms around me are the closest thing to a hug I have received from her.

That night, I deposit the check in my bank account. I don’t feel much richer, though I am, and I am already running through a mental list of bills. Still, I force myself to stop at a nice restaurant, and I pay for a meal and an appetizer and a drink and dessert. The number on the receipt makes me balk, but I have never been so full.

Your words suffocate me.

But your pull is so gravitating.

Your smile is radiant.

But your brown eyes so intoxicating.

Being in your presence brings me warmth.

When I have a moment of weakness, you bring me strength.

But all these things, they seem so pointless in the end.

You make me feel this way, but I don't make you feel the same.

With you, I see happiness, but when I look into your eyes, I can still sense pain.

Maybe because you're not ready for me.

You're still hurt by somebody from your past.

What is meant to be will be.

So I will take these feelings with a grain of salt, because some good things aren't meant to last.

Liking somebody can be hard.

Maybe that person does like you back, but that alone doesn't really mean anything.

It means more when there is an action behind it.

Like if they want to become exclusive, want to be in a relationship, want to be committed.

But, sometimes, even if a person likes you, they might not like you enough.

Enough to become exclusive, enough to be in a relationship, enough to be committed.

They might not like you enough to put aside their fears or their busy schedules.

They might not like you enough to have breakfast every day and dinner every night.

They just might not.

That's why liking somebody can be so hard.

Most of the time it's a waiting game.

And sometimes it's a chase.

Most of the time liking somebody feels like a dream.

And that reality feels like a waste.

But most of the time it's confusing.

You don't know when you're genuinely wasting your time.

Until you really start to like them.

It’s not as simple as one may think

But isn’t as tough as one may say.

Love is respect.

Helping your girl button her shirt in the morning instead of rushing to take it off.

Love is kind.

Holding your girl hours on end while she cries, being strong in her moments of weakness.

Love is vulnerable.

Falling so deep, understanding the consquences and acknowledging the fear of it all, but still falling together.

Love isn’t set in stone, yet it is a building block.

Built upon the foundation of trust and loyalty.

Built upon the care and vulnerability.

There isn’t a certain way how to love.

There are many ways to express love.

But, for the most of us, we learn to love.

Whether it be when we are young or grown.

Pure or not.

Healed or broken.

Perfect or scarred.

The most important part to love is yourself.

You will not be able to love another until you can learn your worth.

It took me years to learn that I am worth it, instead of "I'm not good enough."

It took me years to learn that I'm beautiful, instead of "She's prettier than me anyways."

I am worth it, and I am beautiful.

Love is not as simple as one may think.

Love isn't as tough as one may say.

I am still in the process of learning to love another, but I am excited for what will come my way.

My mirror is broken.

Cracked beyond repair.

My scars they are open.

My pain left to bare.

Through the shards I can see

A torn, broken me.

My mirror is broken.

What would it take to piece back the pieces?

What would it take to change the reflection I see?

But for now, my mirror will stay broken.

Because what is broken is me.

i love you.

for all these years,

i have loved you.

we have grown & shared memories

we have peeled off the outer layers of ourselves,

loving the true meaning of each other

i love you

and i always will.

upon hearing your name,

my fingertips will always immediately

graze my lips,

feeling your lips as if they were

just

on

mine.

but i need to focus.

i need to remember what’s important.

and right now, that isn’t you.

right now, it’s getting into Hopkins.

it’s being busy every day at lunch

at this society or that club.

it’s spending nights studying for the SAT.

it’s not you.

loving means putting you above everything else.

i guess that means

i never loved you

at all.

Je possède l’étoiles

Je leur ai enterré dans vos yeux

Ne te dormi pas, s’il te plaît

Je ne suis pas prête pour l’obscurité

Tu garde les yeux ouvert

J’ai besoin t’amas de lumiere

I own the stars

I’ve buried them in your eyes

Don’t sleep, please

I’m not ready for the dark

Keep your eyes open

I need you for your light clusters

I have two pieces inside of me.

I have a vessel so empty that I can’t bear to eat.

Bones terrified of anything but skin clutching their framework.

A vacant map of carefully crafted dysmorphia that I can’t imagine feeding anything but self-taught lies.

I have a bursting body filled up until all I can do is feast.

Insides begging for all that they can eat.

A rib cage fighting to contain the craving to binge and explode.

I have two pieces, and neither is healthy or sure of itself.

I have two pieces I struggle to control, but neither make up a whole.