❝When your new girlfriend tells you that she loves
you for the first time, you call me first. You say you
can’t handle it. You say it’s too soon. You say words
like smothered and clingy and I’m digging my teeth
into my tongue because you must be the last person to
know, aren’t you, you really must be the last fucking
person on this earth to have a clue. You demand to know
what makes you so lovable. I say empty, meaningless
words like nice and funny because the truth is a lump in
the throat. The truth is that I want everything that has
to do with you, that sometimes that want is another
living, breathing organism—a phantom limb of longing.
You press harder, croon promises of everlasting
friendship into your end of the line and I wonder if you
can hear me falling apart at the joints on my end. I don’t
know when I’ll finally be able to stop writing poems
about you but I imagine it will happen when your new
girlfriend tells you that she loves you for a second time
and you don’t call anyone. You swallow the heavy. You
know you’ll get there eventually, that soon she will be
who you call when you want reassurances of love. My
face is already starting to blur. You say it back.❞
❝I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2 a.m., I am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don’t belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn’t happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the echoes.❞
❝You didn’t love her. You just didn’t want to be alone. Or maybe, maybe she was good for your ego. Or maybe she made you feel better about your miserable life, but you didn’t love her, because you don’t destroy the person that you love.❞
on having a boyfriend with OCDwritingsforwinter:
He was always turning the lights on and off,
opening and closing the door,
counting as he went: thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.
Eventually I had to tell him that if he kept opening the door,
we’d have a whole bunch of house intruders
before the night was through. He responded by trying to kiss me once,
then ended up kissing me twenty-three times, then once more
for an even twenty-four. Then he had to redo two of them
because “our mouths hadn’t been quite aligned.”
Some nights I’d wake up with the moon soaking the bedsheets,
listening to the sound of him repeating the word “fuck”
over and over: he’d stubbed his toe on the bathroom doorway
but couldn’t stop swearing once he’d started.
I fell back asleep after staring at my pillow
until the floral pattern burned into my eyelids,
dreamt the two of us went to an opera but instead of beautiful,
tremulous voices rising high into the air,
two sopranos were singing “fuck” to the tune of La Traviata.
He apologizes the next day, says the new medication
made him feel like shit all the time so he took himself off it;
I respond that it probably made him feel that way
because it was working.
Two days later the ambulance comes and takes him away;
he’d accidentally cut one of his wrists with the steak knife
chopping carrots for stew
but couldn’t have just one cut wrist;
he had to have two.
❝Just because two people are capable of deeply hurting each other over and over again does not make them passionate, star-crossed lovers. It makes them two people who keep doing terrible things to each other. Someone’s ability to make you completely and utterly soul-crushingly miserable does not mean they are a soul mate with some deep insight into your psyche. They are just someone who is really good at making you unhappy.❞
