Shapes

Let me tell you about my life.
I was born next to a blue sea of two sailors. I had a sister who loved me, big dreams that kept me, and a mother who told me that I should be perfect but wouldn’t be. I strived and I tried to be loved by those who would do their best to despise me for my effusive childhood persona. I sang, and I danced, and I slipped under dinner tables crying for what would be perceived as no reason. We moved west. I ran through golden fields and caught tad poles. I prayed to a god I did not understand. I fell in love often, and quickly. I followed my mother to no ends, and she told me I should be perfect, but would never be. I followed my sister, who laughed often, and said nothing at all really, but “it will be okay” in the dark hours when that seemed impossible. I fell in love again, and found heartbreak in a way I thought impossible. I dragged myself through the muck. I sang, and I danced, and I made myself whole again. I found a god I could understand through someone who fell in love with me so I loved him back. We traveled, and enjoyed each other, but I fell out of love, and did not understand why, and he cried, and wrote through my suffering. I dreamt and traveled more. I met someone that was quiet, and sincere who wanted to love me, but then refused to, and I stopped dreaming. I fled, broken wide open by the empty space it left in me, and I came upon a road that would eventually bring me to you. I tossed and I turned, and cried out to the night. I stumbled and I broke upon the waves of this life that could have meant everything but meant nothing at all, and I wondered why. I always wondered why. And when the night answered me it spoke of unnameless fear, of the juxtaposition of my living. Of being loved and unloved. Feared and tossed away. The night spoke. It screamed, and amongst the cries and rambling I ascertained the truth of all the trouble… That some people will love you, and some people will not. That life is full of both, and both are hard, because both come with impossible amounts of expectation and history on both parts. There is no way to understand love. There is no way to hold any one person in one moment of your living, because life moves. Quicker than we want it to, it moves. So you have to too. Move. And breathe. Because tomorrow will be new. Tomorrow will be different. And you cannot know who will love you then, or who you will love then. That is when I met you and that part of me I was sure was cold water only, began to boil and turn into something else. I don’t know to what ends it does, and I don’t think I care, really. I may fall flat on my face. I probably will, given the circumstances, but I also know things are not always so fixed, and sometimes that hardest stuff is also the loveliest. My mother was right… I will never be perfect, but I’m glad. What is in perfect? There’s no way to experience anything but death in something that complete. So I will move. And breathe, and be a part of it all if I can. It will happen whether I decide to or not.

I don’t care.
I don’t care if you can’t hug me in public for more than 3 seconds, because you’re worried about what people will think. I don’t care if you can’t because you’re worried what I will think. I don’t care if you look me in the eye. Or have to defer to high fives. Or wish I wasn’t at all the same parties as you. I don’t care why you would wish that. Maybe it’s because there are girls there you might want to talk to, but don’t feel like you can because of me. Maybe it’s because you know that whatever happened between us will never really go away with us always being in each others faces. Maybe it’s just because I know how awful you can be. How dirty you can be. How mean you are in the dark hours when your selfishness is brought out by one too many drinks. I don’t care if you cringe at my laughter, or my smiling, or my presence in your life. I don’t care if you like my Instagram photos, or read my writing on this blog, or think any of this pertains to you. I don’t care as long as you can get over it long enough to take me home and touch me, push yourself inside me, and then lay your arms across my breasts so I can sleep without feeling so alone in this world. All that other stupid stuff that happens inside of you… I don’t care about it. I don’t care because it’s none of my business. I don’t care because it isn’t my fault, and it probably has nothing to do with me. I don’t care because you mean nothing to me anymore except that I don’t want to sleep here alone. So give it all up if you can at the end of the night and put those hands upon my skin and shut up so I can sleep here and be safe in someone who at least loved some part of me at some point, even if you don’t care which part, or why.

My mind went to you amongst the heavy breathing and fumbling fingers that shook and shimmied down the edges of someone else; all gathered together as a bunch of nerves, shooting off sparks and flutters like fireflies in the southern summer evenings I used to endure as a child. I wrapped myself up in that space between the lies in an attempt to push all the ideas, and all the wishful thinking, and all the everything that’s kept me wrapped in yours instead, out. I shoveled them as coal into a burning fire that had no threat of dying. The embers screamed and raged about and I lay twisting likewise to be as they were, orange and searing, tearing at the throats of those who breathed them in, ripping at the flesh of all those around them.
For too long I’ve flowed as water round your feet, creating little pools and rivers that calmly carried ambitions and hatred in their bodies, like whispers through the cold air, sticking and then freezing in their places. I long to be hot heat, and fume, and the element that causes them, careening through the air to stifle you in your apathy, all smug, and righteous. I long to smoke you out of that phosphorous room and hear you cough up the ash from my fires, watch you choke and spew and writhe in the bright flickering light. Immersed in that furnace you will curse tween labored breaths, your mouth all foul with the stench of it, your hands all grasping at your throat, and I will smile, my nerves bundled up in the edges of someone, some bloodied tongue in my cheek to sing softly of these flames and from where they were born; In the tips of your fingers and the sounds of your sleeping, all gentle and quiet. Ignorant. Unaware of the embers they were feeding. Unaware that they would burn themselves down.

I push myself back into the past before bed sometimes. Just to see what will come up if I do. You know what comes up? You come up. This mindful, fumbling boy… That’s what you look like anyway… But I know better. Behind the walls where you shut the world out is this other thing that writhes and breathes hot air. A man, making my knees shake, my palms wet and marked with these half moons left by my fingernails pressing against them, like you do me. I fumble and quake. And where I might normally ask for this or that, or be some pillar of strength, I come undone, my clothes falling upon the floor, my voice upon the back of your neck, or into my hands to meet those marks so clear and red.
I care little about the rest anymore but what happens to you in those memories. The rest of it is a pain and a bore. But your fingers through my hair, and your mouth reaching inside of me is enough to boil me over… It’s enough to drive me mad in these nights alone, where I stare up at the ceiling, all cold and dark, and I push my fingers where your mouth had been, and it’s not enough. I know it isn’t, so I curse you and my past that held you in it. And I wish I’d never met you so I didn’t have to walk around in this world where I know YOU are living still and you’re not doing that to me. At least if I’d never met you, I wouldn’t have to be here knowing that someone like you could forget me.

It’s funny to think… I have spent so much time forgiving you, accepting your flaws, understanding them, and letting go of all judgement to still find a way to love you with my entire heart. Why can’t I do the same thing for myself, I wonder… Why can’t I look at myself with the same compassion and care as I do those around me? Why can’t I accept myself as I am, and let the bad stuff go to focus on the parts of me that have merit… the parts of me that are lovable and worthwhile.
If I could just find a way to forgive the flaws in myself the way I forgive the ones in you, to love myself with such unadulterated open armedness the way I do you, I’m certain that if no one else ever showed up to give that back to me it wouldn’t matter. But I’m almost just as certain that someone would.

I’ve been sleeping in the shadows you left in my bed. Hauling up in the shapes that formed along the ridges of your spine while the sun grew cold on the other side of the world. These last pages that turned and wrote themselves, spilling out like so many ants marching along the colorful nothings that formed between us, scabbing and leaving scars beneath, dappling our skin with the little lies we whispered at each other there, they can’t be undone. Things like, I would never, or won’t ever, or you are everything there is… They stain the insides and leave unfathomable shame between the hours that hold me hostage, some horrible slinking version of my former self… Some hollow vessel, wracked with a remorse that won’t come undone. Won’t fade. Won’t change from this glistening open mouthed scream in the dark to some other sound. My guts turn, my belly aches with it, and I know that the fear, the sickening horror that lays in wait, just beyond my closing eyes, is a culling song… Death’s toll. A feeble whisper in the night to undo even the best parts of me, whatever of them are left, to watch you always with her inside my head and claw at myself in knowing I was never anything at all.

Listen to me…
It was all a dream. The whole thing was a big, crazy dream. We loved each other, and hated each other all in the same breath, and it went round and round like that, and it probably always will, you see? There’s just no other way it can go.
We loved each other, and we hated each other because we both represented to the other the thing we wanted so desperately, but couldn’t have. Neither one of us could make the other be the dream we were living in, and we knew it. We both knew it was a dream, and a lie… Some impossible version of the world we were forced to be a part of everyday. There’s no room for the truth in a dream like that. There’s all this twirling, and sparkling champagne and lights and beauty that’s overwhelming and so endearing, and you just want to live there, but you can’t because you have to wake up. You have to live in the world where things are sometimes dim and bleak. Every day I would get up and wish I hadn’t… I would wished I could live in that place I’d created so shimmering and new. But it was a dream. A big, crazy dream, and it almost killed me, you see? Because I would have traded in my waking life to stay in it. I would have given it all up to stay with you there, but I couldn’t see that I live in this real world, where things are sometimes dim and bleak. They are, but at least they’re real. At least when I press myself against them, they press back.

You think it’s not impossible? It is. My insides probably look something like a butchers display case before the new delivery comes in… Just all day old meat. You think it’s not impossible for me to sit here and smile? It is. I can promise you that. But I have to put it on, you know? It’s too important, and these illusions of happiness, or readjustments to the way things just have to be have got to hold up. They just have to, because I don’t know that I’ve got anything else to hold to, and all the rest of it is falling down, you see? The lights are going out, and the stairs are caving in, and the walls are undoing themselves, and the grass in the front yard is turning yellow, and the leaves are curling up, and the cracks in the roof are growing, and this thing is impossible. It is. But I’m painting on this show, and I’m getting by because there’s just no other option is there? And what do you do in the face of all that? You actually spite me. You reach out and you deepen the wound, and I have no idea why. There’s no way to figure any of it as far as I can see, so I just add an extra coat of this stuff on to try and patch the cracks up with anything at all that might convince anyone that this grin is real, or that my cackle isn’t covering up the actual hell I’m living in. I don’t know why you hate me so entirely, but I wish I could figure it out so I could apologize for it just to stop the continual attempts on my life. The constant bludgeoning of my insides, that butchers case of meat that once resembled a lovely and appetizing display and is reduced into something you close up shop early because of. I don’t need anymore help from you in this direction.

earl-grey-tea:

leaves fall
from trees
so new leaves
can grow again

relationships
are a lot like
leaves

Beautifully put.

(via attemptatchaos)