my heart is full, exploding. eyes gently lower lids, but remain aware. sleepless nights. filled not with that of my struggles. my heart is full. possibilities.

how do i tie it down? it cannot be grounded

my heart is full. confusion. something not felt, cobwebs stirred. do i remember how to be?
my heart is full. does this stop the cracking
the decay
the mold
the repairs from knocking ceaselessly upon the door

does it end, can it?

my heart is full. but what does that all really mean. does it change anything?
us
the love
anything?

my heart is full...

so what

They haven't spoken about it, they haven't said what will we do when we leave here, do you want to come with me, let's work something out, and she knows that this means they will quickly and easily drift apart, into other people's lives, into other people's arms in rooms like this. She is surprised that this doesn't make her feel sad. She listens to music, she looks around at things people dropped when they fell asleep or went out of the room, she kisses the boy's arm again and she feels only a kind of sweet nostalgia. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowah doowah doowah.
                              ~If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

the days when you looked at me differently, 

i looked at myself differently

you looked at me through shades of grey,

at times i was confusing, i know,

i haven't always known what i wanted

what i needed

i felt an upheaval of matter,

my heart separating

when you looked at me in anger

i was always sorry

on occasion,

you looked at me through the glassiness of your own pain

you needed me, for a change

i held you beneath stars

waves crashing

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

we held each other into the new year

the nights we spent together in the dark

when we could not see

when our hands found each other

under tangles of white sheets

when we needed each other

when you looked at me through pure eyes

like i was everything you had been missing

like you'd found me

when you looked at me like no one has looked at me since

like i was the answer to the question you'd been asking yourself your whole life

L is for the way you look at me.

you never stopped looking at me

i was the first to break

i always lose

sometimes i wish i'd feel your eyes again

some days i wish you'd look at me, just one last time.

then maybe i could look at myself again 

This past weekend, I watched the movie Candy with my closest confidant Theodora. The movie, which if you haven't seen is an undeniable flick that will leave you breathless, shows us Dan and Candy, fearlessly in love and hopelessly addicted to heroin. The twos misadventure can be put so neatly into the words of Fitzgerald, "Helen whom he had loved so until they had senselessly began to abuse each other's love, tear it to shreds." The movie is breathtaking, but chilling, and made me wonder... at what point is love more of a hinderance on our bodies and souls than it is a benefit, and can those desperately attempting to hang onto their love ever admit that it is their affections, in fact, that are tearing them apart? When and how can we admit that love is not always the answer?

~Candy 

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in 

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,mydarling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) 

~e.e. cummings 

Our love was always skinny. Always starving itself - wasting away to nothing. It was never an easy love, never a love that conquered.

Our love always ran across the sidewalk, slipping into cracks, disappearing.

Our love was fleeting.

Our love was confusing, forced. Our love always took sides. But most of all, our love was always skinny.

~

Our love seemed anything but skinny. Always growing - flourishing. It was always an easy love, a love that stole away sorrow.

Our love was a breeze, light and free, enveloping.

Our love was everlasting.

Our love was hypnotizing, a dream. Our love was always the answer. But most of all, our love seemed anything but skinny.

Until I wiped the sleep from beneath silky lids and realized that skinny love is the only love I have ever known.

~

My love was always skinny. Always forced.

My love was heavy with denial and deceit.

My love was a chameleon - blending in with whomever was there.

When the sun rose, shedding delicate rays on the truth, my love was never really love at all but a need for companionship, a hand to hold my heavy heart.

~

All my love was wasted.
And who the hell am I?

I was somebody before the wounds you wove into my skin wore me down. Back when the leaves were still green and the sun still shone, when everything was light. Now, I look in the mirror and see how months have been worn into my eyes. Tear stains cascade down cheeks.

I can't go back. I can't move forward. Motionless.

You walked into my life with a force, strong and blinding, and I fell. Not at first, not quickly, but one day at a time. And after days turned into weeks and weeks to months, I surrendered to the beat beneath my breast.

Captured by the charm... the acceptance, the flow of your words pressed up against my ear. Captured by your ability to twirl deceit between your fingers, curling those tainted tips into the palm of my hand.

Our love grew as a vine around us, our bodies into one. Under the constellations it grew. On the sands of beaches we called our own, it grew. Four hundred and sixteen days it flourished.

Before it shattered.

My puzzle piece is missing, the one painted glossily with confidence and knowledge of self-worth. It may be buried in the back pocket of one of those pairs of khaki shorts you always wore, in case you ever felt the impulse to return it, an apology. I, with a more practical approach, see my puzzle piece laying at the bottom of the deepest and darkest ocean, in the farthest of lands, a little part of it's paint disappearing each day. You, having hurled it there, along with all the other pieces of me you stole.

How can I be mad... you were so sly, stealing only small bits so I could not notice until the day when I looked in the mirror to see the lost months worn into my eyes and the tear stains on my cheeks and the gaping hole in my chest. Utterly exposed. I'm never getting my pieces back, am I?

I was somebody before you, but I cannot seem to find the corner in which that person is hiding. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ready or not, here I come.

Nowhere to be found.

I was somebody before I lost you, before I lost myself.

A day, one that cannot be detailed with any significance, my body began swaying back and forth. For hours, back and forth, back and forth. I licked my lips and tasted the ocean's salt on my lips. Back and forth. Open your eyes. I did, eventually, only to realize I was drifting in the open sea, and slowly, I was drifting away from solid ground.

Reality is lost.

I cannot. I will not. I shall not. Commandments. Mine. I cannot let my heart drop, a pin to the floor, making the smallest of sounds, at the mention of three consonants and a vowel. A name. Not intended to do harm. Yet, holds the ability to alter the weight of the world. Your gravitational pull on my life astonishes me all the time. After everything, it's still there.

The night is clear, not crystal, but clear all the same.
... Somebody else
... I'm so sorry
I still love you, but it's not the same...

Both shedding tears. My inability to understand, to accept, slapped me across my face. It hasn't stopped slapping me since. Our tears fell at the same time. I watched them, utterly aware that my tears and his were not the same.

Struggling to speak, anything... I told you it had all been a lie. I wish I did not believe that. I wish I believed there was time with you and me, when the leaves were still green and the sun still shone, when everything was light. Someday I'll  feel that warmth again.

Rain began to drop after words were said, decisions made. Droplets enveloping me. Attempted consolation. Walked away, crashed into a wave of pain.

I was somebody before you decided that I wasn't.

Paralysis.
A state of helpless inactivity, or inability to act.

I asked mine well. Tucking it tightly into confines only I could see. Until the breakdowns began.

They started without any warning. Masked beneath cheap vodka and carbonated chasers. Finding myself along, crouched in the last stall, my prison. Overwhelmed by all the unnamed sorrow held within myself, bubbling up. I was a volcano simply waiting to erupt.

These late night disintegrations initiated the skeptical looks,, the "Are you okays?"
Denial is the name of the game.

235 days is 5,640 hours. 5,640 hours is 338,400 minutes.
Three hundred and thirty-eigh thousand, four hundred minutes is a long time to be lingering in sadness.

I am blind. A thick glaze of misconception has set upon the hazel of each iris, spreading to the depths of my pupils. Glass, puddles, shadows... all cast back the reflection of mediocrity.

Atelphobia; the fear of not being good enough. Too big. Not flat enough. Must be skinnier. Ugly. My skin, my insides, my soul, all which became the problem.

I was somebody before I decided that I wasn't.

In the end everything in the kitchen sink that is the world was swept away into my drain. I am left to deal. But the wind keeps pushing me backward and the leaves won't bloom, they're supposed to but they won't. Stubborn. And the sun has hidden its face behind the clouds and there is no light and you keep knocking me down. You keep knocking me down.

You keep knocking me down.

Am I ever going to be able to pull myself off the ground?

I was somebody.

no shame in saying that i felt a loneliness drifting through me. funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it make sense, logical and final
                                                         ~Let the Great World Spin