"Relationship goals"

(It has been hurting me lately that there's no reasonably decent way to fit my "...and" in my blog titles, but leggooo.) Not actually about anybody at all, just a free verse that rode my head too hard. 

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#hastagrelationshipgoals-

But I want a relationship we can't tweet about... A little secrecy and some privacy, little hints that I'm yours and you're mine but they'd never know what we get up to

with your lips laughing against my neck, my sides, my tummy and my thighs

in the backseat, on the front steps, before we say goodnight. 

"I'd never ride for a [n*gga] who had bitches in the backseat"-

It's like we're flying down miles and miles of asphalt with barely any brakes and absolutely no hesitation 

your seatbelt is off, your left hand around my right one, your thumb rubbing circles into my skin 

burning tires and windows down. 

"Degrees and dreams, instead of J's and Mary jane"-

That easy way you tell me to do what makes me happy, even if you know I have to go somewhere far away 

How you kiss me like I'll disappear in the seconds that we have left 

How I'd sometimes rather not have any ambition if it meant I had to go anywhere at all- 

Light one up and maybe I'll get high with you, high enough to forget that we won't be in the same place in twelve weeks and four days and fifty something seconds and this doesn't even make sense but when you hold me I think maybe everything will be okay if we never move. 

Sex- 

But sometimes not sex. 

Occasionally just touching, drinking, drowning. Trembling trembling. Leaves before they fall, shudders along a spine, damp breath rattling between teeth (yours, mine).  

Sometimes you just touch me, your hands silent as they ghost on the sides of my body as you trace your path from ribs to waist to hips to thighs to hips to waist to ribs and I count backwards from ten and try not to implode into tiny constellations

And sometimes I touch you, my heart in my throat and my fingers buried in velvet and silk pooling between my legs. 

-

This is it, for now. But a work in progress perhaps. 

On Epic Sidekicks, Falling for your Best Friend and

Are you foolish enough to believe that this is some kind of fairytale? This is real life. This is not a fairytale. You don't get the guy. 

You get your heart broken.

Your best friend of the opposite sex will be your sidekick. They will be the lifeboat you turn to when your female friends are going on and on and on and you need a time out. They will keep your secret football team a secret. They will listen to you cry and cuss and wail about the boys who hurt you, the boys who you liked who weren't worth your time. They will warn you when boys have bad intentions. They will eat icecream with you at 4 pm on a school day when you want to binge (and then let you eat their icecream when your own cup is not enough and they will not judge you, only pretend to object as they tilt the cup so your spoon has better leverage). They will know without words that you are not okay. They will put puzzles together with you.  They will have faith in you. 

And you will love them for these things. 

...then you will love them for who they are. You will love them because of the way they react when you rub cupcake icing on their face. You will love them for the times they forgot to pretend to be tougher than you, and accidentally showed a little too much weakness. You will love them when they feel worthless because you have seen their value in the millions. You will love them because they're mostly irrational and a little loud and kinda hilarious, but they're sorta just perfect like that. You will love them because they've kept everything you've ever given them—even an assortment of leaves and flowers and odds and ends. You will love them because they are the Sun to your moon, even though you like to pretend you could possibly be the Sun (but c'mon let's be real—they sorta light up your whole life with just a smile, you faker).

Then you will fuck up, and you will lose them and you will realise just how much you love them. 

So, do not keep sidekicks of the opposite sex. Do not keep best friends who are boys who make you spin dizzy circles. Do not get addicted to another human. Do not be ignorant to how fast you are falling, or that you are falling any at all. And most certainly do not spend hours binge-watching romantic comedies where best friends end up together and reading Thought Catalogs about best friend romances when you realise you might possibly have something more than a crush on your (former) best guy friend and super sidekick. That is pathetic. 

Almost as pathetic as a blog post and fifty million drafts. 

Prompt: "What happens when logic fails?"

What happens when there is no tidy way to explain your emotions? No formula to simplify your feelings? 

When reason fails to reason with your faulty reasons, do you reason with God? Do you make demands of God, or gods, swearing why me why me why fucking me at the skies like a drunken fool- standing in the rain with no umbrella and shouting at heaven in the hopes that she will close her fists and stop pouring down pain? Do you scream at the man in the sky for the answers to a deluge of questions in a language you don't even speak?

                              Et maintenant, Dieu? 

When logic fails and you must face emotion, does your passion cripple you with the weight of a grand piano on the brittle bones of baby birds? Does your passion sing in tenors and sopranos across the cavities in your chest, echo rising to fill the space between the notes? Is it loud and angry and overcompensating? 

Or is your passion silent? Does it stream down your face and make home in your eyes and draw a blanket to its chin? Will this silent passion sit on your heart and bend your veins like strings of some cello rested between knees, pulling silent notes from a broken instrument? Do you bite back the scream that bubbles up your chest and threatens to swallow you if you don't swallow it? Has it been silent so long that it forgets words?

            When men cry out, do their tears speak a language that this God understands?

Perhaps when logic fails, faith sings a quiet song of we will try again tomorrow. 

An Open Letter to Exes

Not to be caught feelings over. Don't take it personally, if you ever see this.
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The first break is not the break up; the first break is the broken window on the second floor that we crack when we shut the window too hard on a cold night.

The second break is still not the break up; the second break is the light bulb that goes out suddenly and leaves us in the dark. Two hopeless, frustrated people who grasp things clumsily and stub our toes on the corners of furniture and trip over the piles we've swept under the rug. 

The third break is the break up. The whole house is silent, except for the steady dripping of a tap that drives us both crazy. 

I move back into my parents' home, admitting we are not ready to live on our own. 

But now you unroll the welcome mat again, you trim the hedges that have climbed high over the fences, you dust the windowsills and replace the broken windowpane, you've changed all the lights. 

You try to convince me that a house once stripped bare of the pictures on the walls, the footsteps in the halls and the dinner on the table can be a home again. You try to whitewash out the stains and vacuum the carpet but this whole house smells like smoke. 

Like a dream lit on fire by two careless children, more in love with the way the fire burned that November than with much anything else. Those two children with burns on their arms, with new scars now. 

Two children who aren't quite children. Who don't fit in their childhood beds and have outgrown the swing on the porch. 

Who have songs that they can't listen to, other people who they have hosted, other houses they have visited. 

Who have outgrown this space—who awkwardly bump into furniture they once skirted easily around in the dark. 

Maybe it's time we finally stop trying to fix this place and put it up for sale. 

I've never smoked a cigarette, or did a line of cocaine, or tipped ecstasy to the back of my throat or rolled a single spliff and

Maybe that means I've never been addicted. 

(That is a lie.) 

Because I used to pop you like pills. You'd live on the tip of my tongue. I'd drink you like a thirsty man with a glass of salt water. 

I'd fill myself with you til you'd buzz through my veins and filter out my nostrils and seep through my pores. 

I couldn't get enough. 

I had to give you up. (Because they were right about how you'd fool me twice and the shame would be all mine.) 

...but like the man who gave up smoking and gets trapped in an elevator with a man and his cigarette, all I really needed was a reminder 

      of how you fit between my lips and on the tip of my tongue. 

(Third time might just be the charm.)

                     she says before relapse. 

Because finally I am admitting that I am broken and

Mostly bitter and angry and full of resentment. A prose poem of three or four different prose poems—I haven't decided yet. To him, and you... always different hims and yous. Unproofread, plenty errors. 

- 1 -

I love love.  

That same love I embraced like a friend and scorned me and shamed me and made a poet and a writer out of my mother's little lawyer. 

That love that turned me into a cynical realist, disgraced and ashamed by the half of me that craved the love that never loved me and mourned the hopeless romantic I was reborn from. 

That love that made me want to take the hand of the version of me before love's scorn and tell her that she was beautiful... So that she would not be surprised when she heard it from him, or him or any of the hims that would use it like a bandaid to cover the festering flesh wound they would open with their teeth. 

That love that made me a dirty secret. That made me let him fill me with bubbles and other things, but never meet my eyes—but did those other girls know he called me babe and told me how empty he felt when the people around him died? 

That love that made my memory sharp like the tongues of those boys who were quick to kiss but slow to care. Made it easy to remember warm hands and sweet words and forget what I deserved. 

That love that never loved me back. 

- 2 -

I thought I loved you. And you. And maybe even you, sometimes. 

I thought I loved you when you called me at two in the morning, said you were dying to hear my voice and asked me to read to you my favourite book. I later learnt you were playing Fifa the whole time. 

I thought I loved you when you gently picked up the poem I dramatically threw down a flight of stairs in sheer frustration with myself and how I had scarred the paper with my own madness. You read it once, twice, three times. I counted backwards in my head with my eyes closed as you kept reading. I thought I was falling in love with you. 

I thought I loved you, some nights when sleep was far and the air was thick and the heat was high and red was the colour of everything. When your voice, thick like honey and sweet like sugar, lulling me like some low, slow sankey, filtered through the phone. 

I thought I loved you when you told me that my jaw ticks when I am angry, and I cover my mouth when I smile, and I never cry where anyone can see. 

I thought I loved you when you said you loved me and I figured I should have said it too. 

I think I still love you. 

I think I always will love you. 

So to the boys who I thought I loved, who maybe I actually did, who I thought loved me, who came before, who hurt my friends, who I thought were different, who taught me twice... This is what you made me. 

- 3 - 

And finally to me, and the others like me.

To my friends who are with guys they are afraid might hurt them. To the girls who are sleeping with guys who don't love them. To girls who have cried themselves to sleep. To girls who are trying to make someone stay. To girls who love love when love doesn't love them back. 

Love yourself first.