[luminote]

If only to ruin us all over again, please, one more time?

[luminote]

I cut my hair after growing it out for over a year. I'll change. I'll change.

[hellagross]

[le-bronzage-est-delicieux]

Alice Pilate

[visual-poetry]

[04k96]

Via

[out-andabout]

more

[out-andabout]

more

[out-andabout]

tumblr . out-andabout

[514131]

everything i touch remembers you—

the wind that lifts my hair,

the floorboards that creak under my weight,

the cup i hold trembling in the morning light.

i am patient with your absence.

i build rooms in my memory

where you exist,

but they are empty halls,

and you do not enter.

and yet, i follow the trace of you

in the smallest gestures,

in the pause before speech,

in the turning of a season

that reminds me:

what i cannot hold

still shapes the world i inhabit.

[514131]

and i loved you in a way that did not ask to be kept. i loved you the way wind loves a bird — not to cage it, but to lift it. if your feet itched for distant cities, i loosened my grip on the map. if your hands reached for the sky, i unclasped mine and stepped back so you could rise without weight.

run the world, i would say. let it open for you like a field without fences. let every horizon bend toward your ambition. i will not anchor you to my wanting. i will not make a home out of your wings.

i will stand where the earth is steady and watch you ascend, not with sorrow, but with awe. i will measure my happiness by the height of your flight. and if you disappear into the blue, becoming smaller and brighter until you are only a glint against the sun, know that my love was never a chain — it was the quiet ground that believed in your sky.

[514131]

god,

if solitude is the life you have written for me,

then quiet this aching need to be loved.

teach my heart to rest

in the silence you have given it,

to stop reaching

for hands that never arrive.

if i must walk alone,

let the longing grow still —

like a prayer

that has finally learned

how to sleep.

[514131]

my mother is still alive

and yet i grieve her

the way people grieve ruined cathedrals—

still standing,

but emptied of the thing that made them holy.

she is in our hometown

washing rice, folding clothes,

asking if we have eaten enough,

while entire versions of herself

rot quietly beneath the floorboards of duty.

sometimes i catch it—

a flicker in her face

when she speaks about the girl she was

before we arrived like small hungers

with school uniforms and fevers

and mouths always opening for more.

god, i did not know

that childhood feeds on mothers.

i did not know

that every comfort she gave us

was cut from the fabric of her own life,

that while i was becoming a person

she was becoming less of one.

and the cruelest part is this:

she loves us enough

to call the ruin worth it.

meanwhile i stand here

twenty-something years later,

holding the unbearable inheritance

of finally seeing her—

not as “mom,”

but as a woman

who disappeared so slowly

no one noticed until her exhaustion

became the atmosphere of the house.

i want to return her to herself.

i want to hand back the years

like stolen objects.

her sleep.

her laughter.

the life she kept postponing

until postponement became permanent.

but all i can do

is watch her carry love

like a wound that never closed,

and understand too late

that some mothers spend their whole lives

dying in ways gentle enough

for their children not to notice.

[514131]

one day my name may become something you speak in the past tense. photographs will yellow, my voice will fade into imperfect recollection, and the world will continue with its ordinary indifference. but if there is one thing i refuse to believe can perish, it is this: i loved you with a devotion that exceeded my own lifetime. i have never been more certain of anything than i am of that.

[paper-wounds]

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

[mollybeenoel]

[crimsolyn]