Fragmented Soul

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

The night has that sickly orange glow, the pavement is cracked and someone has spat gum into the patterns. I step over it, you step right through it. I want to clean your shoes but I don't.

Can we take the long walk home?

We pass a convenience store, the fluorescent light buzzes like a trapped fly. Inside, a man is buying milk at 2 am. He has the face of someone who will drink it alone and leave the carton on the counter till it curdles. I think of curdling, of how I am curdling inside.

You walk too fast, your legs are longer or maybe I am just slow because I m trying to stretch this moment into a lifetime. Every step I take is a prayer to God, slow down, please slow down.

You don't slow down.

The street is littered with things no one wanted, a broken umbrella, a single high heel, a bus ticket that expired in 2019, I pick up the ticket and I put it in my pocket.

I don't know why.

Maybe because it's like me, used up and still pretending it has somewhere to go.

You ask me what I'm doing.

I say nothing.

You shrug.

You keep walking.

We pass a dog, it watches us from behind and it doesn't bark. I stare at it and it stares back.

I want to stop and let the dog look at me forever but you're already 10 steps ahead and your silhouette is getting smaller and the streetlight is swallowing you and I cannot lose you so I run to catch up.

My lungs burn, my knees make a sound like old wood, you don't ask if I'm okay.

We take a shortcut through the park. The grass is wet with something that could be dew. I step in it, and it soaks through. I can feel the damp seeping into my socks. This is what love feels like, a slow cold wetness that you can't escape.

The swings creak in the wind, there is no child on them, they swing anyway, empty. Back and forth I want you to push me in a swing but the swings are empty and you are walking and the park is dead.

A plastic bag floats across the path and I watch it.

You ask if we're almost there. I lie and say no.

We pass a house with its lights on, through the window I see a family eating dinner. The table is round, plates are mismatched, the mother is laughing, the father is reaching across to touch her hand, the children are shoveling food into their mouths and arguing about something stupid.

I stop walking, I stand in the dark and watch them.

A family, a table, a hand reaching across.

You stop too, you look at me and say that's nice and keep walking.

I stay for one more second, i press my palm against my chest and feel my heart. It's beating, that is the only thing it knows how to do, beat and keep beating even when there's no reason to.

I run to catch up again.

The road gets narrower, the streetlights get farther apart. We walk in pockets of dark and pockets of orange. Your face flickers in and out, sometimes I see you clearly, the curve of your jaw and the way your hair falls. Other times you're just a shape, a silhouette I am chasing.

I trip on a crack in the pavement, I catch myself.

You don't turn around.

What if I fell and broke my ankle and couldn't get up? Would you notice? Would you turn around? Would you carry me? Or would you just keep walking?

I think you would keep walking

I think I would let you.

We pass a telephone booth. It is old. It has no phone inside, just a cord that dangles like a dead snake. Someone has scratched "I LOVE YOU" into the glass. Below it, someone has scratched "LOL."

I trace the letters with my finger. The glass is cold. The "LOVE" part is deeper than the "LOL" part. I want to believe that means something.

That love cuts deeper than mockery.

You ask what I'm looking at. I say nothing. You're getting impatient, I can tell by the way you shift your weight from foot to foot. You want to get home, want this walk to end.

I don't want it to end. I would walk for days. I would walk through the rain and the dark and the cold and the garbage and the broken glass. I would walk until my feet bled and the blood made footprints behind us and the footprints wrote a story no one would read.

I would walk until the world ended but you are walking and the world is not ending and my feet are not bleeding yet and I am still following you.

We finally reach the block. I can see the building.The familiarity is the worst part because it means the walk is almost over and soon you will go inside and I will stand outside and the door will close and I will be alone again.

I stop walking.

You keep walking.

You reach the steps and put your hand on the railing. You turn around and you look at me for the first time in hours.

"Goodnight," you say.

I want to scream. I want to drop to my knees on the dirty steps and claw at your ankles. I want to say please, just a little longer, just five more minutes, just one more block, just let me see your face for one more second, please please please.

I say "goodnight."

You turn around.

You unlock the door. The door closes.

I hear the click of the lock. I stand there, the cold air hits the back of my neck, my feet are wet, my knees ache, my heart is doing that thing again, beating, beating, beating.

Can we take the long walk home?

Can we take the walk that goes past the house where the family is eating dinner and the dog is waiting behind the fence and the telephone booth has "I LOVE YOU" scratched into the glass? Can we take the walk that goes on forever? Can we take the walk that ends with us not at a door but on a bench, watching the sun come up, watching the city wake, watching each other?

Can we take the walk where I finally hold your hand?

Can we take the walk where you hold mine back?

Can we take the long walk home?

Please.

I have nowhere else to go.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I found you on the shore. The one inside my chest, where the water is darker and the sand is made of all the things I should have said. You were kneeling, your hands were cupped, you were trying to hold something that had already slipped through. I wanted to tell you, "stop, let it go, the tide was never meant to be kept." But my voice doesn't reach you anymore.

You keep stirring the water so it won't rot. I know, I've been watching. Every prayer you whispered to the sea, I heard. Every time you shook your heart to remind yourself I still loved you, I felt it but love is not a fist my love, love is not something you can grip until your knuckles turn white and your hands go numb. I tried to tell you this. I tried to show you but you were so busy saving the part of me you thought you needed that you didn't see the rest of me, the vast, the deep, the ever-changing drowning just a little further out.

You think I left, I didn't leave. The moon pulls the tide and the tide pulls back. I loved you the way the ocean loves the shore, with a force that shapes entire coastlines but you wanted me to be a lake. I was never a lake, I was salt and storm and the shimmer of a moon you couldn't see because you were looking down at your own fists, checking for leaks.

You asked if a part was also the ocean, yes, a part was the ocean but the ocean is not a part, the ocean is everything everywhere, all at once and you held a handful and called it 'us'

You held a handful and said, "see, I've kept it safe" but the handful was never meant to be kept. It was meant to soak back into the sand and rise again as mist and fall again as rain and find its way back to me, to you, to the cycle that keeps the world alive.

I'm not lost. You keep asking if I'm lost. I'm not lost. I'm right here, in the water that terrifies you. I'm in the cold that numbs your fingers. I'm in the lighthouse beam you refuse to follow. I'm in the friends who call your name, who beg you to step out of the grief you've been holding so dearly.

I'm not in the water you saved, I'm in the water you let go. I'm in the tide that always leaves and always returns. I'm in the salt that stings your eyes until you can't separate your tears from the sea, that's me. The ache behind your ribs that feels like drowning. I'm not punishing you, I'm asking you to stop holding. I'm asking you to open your hands and let the ocean be the ocean. Let me be the tide. Let yourself be the shore.

You're drowning, I know you're drowning. I can feel the water in your lungs as if it were in mine. The broken heart racing in your ribs, the darkness closing in, I feel all of it and I'm trying to reach you. I'm trying to tell you, swim up, let go, the promise you made was never one I asked for.

You promised to keep the water from changing. You promised to hold a tide that was never yours to still, I didn't want a promise. I wanted you.

I wanted you to float with me, not anchor us both to a shore that was already eroding but you wouldn't let go and now you're drowning and I can't save you because you're still holding the part you thought was me and it's weighing you down, and you refuse to open your hands. You refuse to believe that letting go is not betrayal. Letting go is love.

There's a lighthouse. Do you see it?

It's been there the whole time. I built it for you. Every beam of light is a message, come home, to yourself. to the shore that doesn't require you to drown for love to be real.

Please, I'm begging you now. I'm kneeling on the other side of this water and my hands are open, and I'm showing you, this is how you hold the tide, you don't, you let it wash over you, you let it go.

The part you saved is not me. The part you saved is a memory and memories are beautiful, but they are not alive.

I am alive. I am still, after everything, after the drowning and the darkness and the terrible weight of your devotion, I am still loving you, not the way you want but the way I can. The way the ocean loves the shore, by returning, and leaving, and returning again.

Let go. Let go. Let go.

Can you feel it now? The water around your ankles? The pull of the tide?

Come home.

Come home.

Come home.

Did you run away, I don't need to know

But if you ran away, come back home-

(Just come home)

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

There is a room that overlooks the mountains where I go when the world is too much.

The peaks are always there, steady like the pain in my chest that I have been carrying for longer than I can remember. The air is thin and cold and the light falls in long amber ribbons across the valleys and I sit there, watching the horizon knowing that somewhere beyond it, there is you.

I promised you a seat.

I promised you a place beside me, a place where you could rest, a place where you could be safe, a place where you could be loved and I meant it.

I meant it with the whole of my broken heart. I meant it with every word I have ever written, every prayer I have ever whispered, every hope I have ever held in my trembling hands.

I meant it but I am afraid.

I am afraid that you will not believe me. I am afraid that you have been promised too many things by too many people who did not mean them. I am afraid that my words will sound like theirs, that my promise will sound like their lies, that my love will sound like their leaving. I am afraid that you will sit on that bench, waiting for a bus that does not come and you will think of me and wonder if I am real.

I am real.

The space beside me is real and it is empty and it is waiting for you. I have saved it for you since before I knew your name. I have kept it warm with the hope of you. I have carved your initials into the windowsill with the sharp edge of my longing and I am afraid.

I am afraid that you will not come.

I am afraid that you will look at the empty space and see all the other spaces that were promised to you and taken away. I am afraid that you will see the shadows of everyone who left and assume that I will be the same. I am afraid that you will not believe that I am different.

I am different.

I am the one who will stay.

I am the one who will hold you when the night is deep and slow and the stars are heavy and the world is cold.

I am the one who will catch you when you fall, who will carry you when you cannot walk, who will sit with you in the quiet and not run away.

I am the one who meant it.

So I will sit in this room that overlooks the mountains, and I will wait. I will wait for the light to shift across the peaks, for the snow to melt and fall and melt again, for the seasons to turn and turn and turn.

I will wait because you are out there, somewhere, on a bench of your own, waiting for a bus that will not come, saving a seat for me and I will come.

I will come because I promised.

I will come because I meant it.

I will come because you are the only seat I want.

I will come because you are the only place I want to be so wait for me.

Wait for me on your bench. Wait for me because I am coming. Wait for me because I will hold you. Wait for me because I will never let go.

I will come.

I swear it.

I will come.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I was born melting, I came into this world already dripping, already losing shape, already a puddle pretending to be solid, the sun didn't do this to me, the sun finished what was always going to happen.

There's blood under my fingernails from clawing at my chest, trying to keep the wax in, trying to keep the heart whole, trying to keep the shape of a girl who had it together, the blood is waxy too, it doesn't flow right, it clots too fast, sticks to my skin like guilt, mostly like the people who told me that I'm too much, or too soft, or too easy to melt.

I want to show them the puddle now, I want to point at the pink stain and say, see? See what happens when you tell a wax heart that it's too much? It believes you, it tries to be less and less and less until there's nothing left but a stain that you can step over on your way to something better.

The blood is everywhere now, it's on my clothes, my hands, my face, it's under my tongue, metallic and warm, it's in my eyes, clouding my vision turning the world red and pink and the color of the inside of a body that was never supposed to be on the outside and still the sun shines and still the people walk past and still no one stops, no one kneels, no one says, let me help you. let me carry you to the shade, let me be the night you've been waiting for your whole life.

No one is coming.

No one remembers.

The stain will be gone by summer.

The sun is rising again, the pavement is warming, the last of the wax is softening the last of the blood is fading, the last of the heart is becoming, nothing.

The sun wins and the wax hearts of the world melt and melt and melt and are never ever saved.

"I'm a heart made of wax and I'm melting in the sun."

.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

The worst part being, I was made wrong from the beginning. The wax was too soft, wick was too thin, the mold was cracked before it ever set. I was a defective heart, I was a heart that should never have been made and I am here still, beating against all odds pumping wax through wax veins trying to be a real heart in a world that only knows how to burn

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

A heart made of wax still bleeds, it bleeds red and thick.

Like honey left too long in the cold. The blood and the wax mix together until you can't tell which is which, which is the wound and which is the heart, which is the damage and which is the original sin.

I am the color of the scar that hasn't healed now, the color of a scream that never made it out.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I'm a heart made of wax and I'm melting in the sun, my left ventricle is sliding down my chest, you can see the chambers of me, valves that never closed properly, arteries that carried love to all the wrong places, they're dropping now, pooling at my feet, making a sound like a faucet that won't stop.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

And the sound is my heartbeat now.

It's the only heartbeat I have left.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

The stage is empty, the lights are dim and there's a chair in the center of the stage.

One chair, wooden, worn. It has held the weight of a thousand performances, a thousand monologues, a thousand moments when someone stood in the light and told the truth.

I am standing beside the chair, wearing a costume that looks like me and not like me at the same time. My hands are shaking as they always do before a performance, before I step into the light and become someone other than myself, the parts that are too dark, too broken and too full of the things I have done and the things that have been done to me.

The lights come up like the sun rising over a battlefield and I begin.

I am the hero, the one who fights for what is right.

I am the hero in the script I wrote for myself. I save people, hold them when they cry, tell them it'll be okay.

But the stage is large and the light is shifting and there is another costume waiting in the wings. A darker costume, and a heavier one.

A costume that feels like it was made from the shadows I tried to bury. I put it on and I become the villian.

No no, not the villain who laughs while the world burns, not the villain who cackles and twirls his moustache and ties damsels to railroad tracks, no.

The villain I become is more patient, she's the one who hurts without meaning to, the one who loves too hard and then breaks what she loves.

I have hurt people, good people.

People who loved me, and I proved them wrong everytime because I was taught love was a weapon and I have been swinging it ever since.

The stage is dark now, and the lights are off. I am standing in the middle of the stage, wearing both costumes, the hero and the villain.

I look at my hands, they're shaking. They shake because they want to hold someone, they shake because they are afraid that this time, they'll hold someone and never let go.

I am playing both roles in the script and I'm so tired of the performance. I want to tear the costumes off, stand on the stage and let the world see me as I am.

The parts I'm proud of and the parts I've spent my whole life trying to forget. I want someone to see me.

But the stage is empty, the lights are dim and I'm alone in this empty theatre.

I'm the hero, and the villain and the one who waits for the day the curtains will fall and I will get to walk offstage and into the arms of someone who sees me.

For now though,

Hero and villain.

I'm playing both in the script.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Would you love me if I was a worm?

No, I won't ask you that.

Let me ask you something else,

Would you love me if I hurt you?

Not on purpose, I would rather cut off my own hands than use them to wound you but I have sharp edges I don't know about until someone is already bleeding. I have a mouth that says the wrong thing in the wrong tone and I only realize it when I see your face changes.I have a silence that's worse than any scream, im here but I'm not here, I'm with you, I love you but I don't know how to show it right now.

Would you love me through that?

Would you love me when it hurts even when I don't intend on doing so? Even when it's just me fighting my own demons and losing?

Would you love me if I cried too much? I cry alot. I cry at sunsets, I cry at the way the moon looks when it's full and low and I remember you, I cry until my eyes are swollen and my throat is raw and I look like a drowned person.

Would you still think i was beautiful? Would you hold me? Would you mean it?

Would you love me if I couldn't love you back the right way? Because I don't know the right way. I was never taught. I learned love from movies and books. I love wrong, too hard or not hard enough. I love like a dying star, would you accept that love? Would you teach me a better way? Or would you just...leave?

Would you love me if I drew blood? Not yours, mine.

If I scratched my own heart and offered it to you on a plate, still bleeding. Would you take it? Would you know what to do with it? Or would you look at it, and say, "I didn't ask for this, I don't want this. Take it back"

And I would take it back and shove it back into my chest and go home. Then I would sit in the grey room and I would think, "I am too much. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

I don't understand it, I don't understand you. I don't understand how someone can look at a burning building and decide to walk in instead of run away. I am a burning building, I have been on fire since I was a child and everyone I've ever loved has stood outside and watched me burn and said, I'm sorry, I can't, it's too hot, it's too much and then they left.

But you're still standing there, you're still watching, you might even be walking towards the flames, and I want to scream, don't, save yourself, I'm not worth the burns

But I also want to whisper, please, please, please, come closer, I've been so cold, I've been on fire and I'm still cold, doesn't that make you sad, doesn't that make you want to hold me.

If the world ended tomorrow, if the bombs fell and the sky cracked and the oceans rose, would you find me? Would you run through the fire and the flood and the crumbling buildings just to hold my hand one last time?

The bombs are falling, I've been living under the bombs my whole life, the bombs of depression, trauma, of the void that keeps me asking for more. And I am so tired of ducking, of covering my head and waiting for the impact. I want to stand up, I want to open my arms, I want to let them fall and scream that I don't care anymore.

I just want to kiss you before they hit.

Would you kiss me? Even with the bombs falling, even with the world ending, even knowing that kissing me means kissing the fire and the cold together.

Would you love me?

Would you hold me?

Would you burn with me?

Would you kiss me while the world ends?

Would you?

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I know what your dreams are, you want to wake up early enough to see the sun rise and not feel like you're grieving something you can't name. I know what nags you at the back of your mind, "Am I doing this right? Am I enough?"

I know all of this, but I don't know how it feels when I look your way and find you looking at me.

At me, not past me or through me, at me. The way the moon looks at the sea, the way the dying look at the window, and I don't know how that feels like.

I only know what it feels like to be the one looking. I have been looking my whole life.

I am always cold, perhaps cold is the childhood I never lived, the love I never received, the arms that were never open when I needed them. Maybe the cold is just poor circulation and anaemia and a body that forgot how to regulate it's own temperature because no one ever held it long enough to teach it but I wonder, I wonder all the time how long does it take for my hands to warm up against yours?

If you held them, I mean. If you took my fingers, all ten of them and pressed them between your palms, how many seconds? How many minutes? Would the warmth start at the fingertips and travel upwards, the wrist, the forearm, the elbow or would it be instant? I want to know, I want to press my cold hands to your warm ones and feel the temperature of being loved.

Last night, I dreamed that the stars were falling. Burning chunks plummeting towards the earth, trailing fire and smoke and the end of everything. I stood in the field, barefoot, the grass wet with dew or maybe with tears and I watched them fall.

One by one, then dozens, then hundreds.

The sky was on fire, and I wasn't afraid. I was just...waiting? For one of them to hit me.

And then I heard your voice behind me. You said my name. I turned around and you were there and you were looking at me already, and the stars were still falling but now they were just the lights, the movie effect where the only plot is you and me and the end of the world.

I woke up with blood on my pillow, a nosebleed probably, but it looked like I had been somewhere real, somewhere with you.

I think about dying, what would it be like to stop. To not wake up? To not have to carry this cold body through another grey morning? Would the void be warm? Would it feel like your hands? Would it feel like being held?

I don't want to die, I just want the pain to stop, I want the cold to stop. I want to know how it feels like to be warm without having to ask for it.

I don't know how long it takes for my hands to warm up against yours but I want to find out. I want to count the seconds, I want to write them down, I want to turn them into a poem.

The stars are falling, and I have been looking at them my whole life, and I am thinking of you, your hands and the void, and the dreams and all the things i know and all the things I don't.

I don't know much, I know you're scared, I know your void, I know the taste of my own tears and the sound of my silence. I know how to be alone, I know how to exist and survive.

But I don't know how it feels like when I look your way and find you already looking at me.

I want to know.

Are you looking?

Are you?

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Don't fall in love with people like me

I'll tell you why.

Don't fall in love with people like me.

People like us will love you with our whole bodies, with our whole hearts. We will love you with the parts of ourselves we have not shown anyone else. We will love you in the morning and in the evening and in the middle of the night when the world is sleeping and we are still awake thinking about you.

But here is the thing,

We do not know how to be loved.

We have spent so long being hurt that hurt has become our home. We have spent so long being invisible that we do not know how to stand in the light so when you really love us, we will not know what to do with it. We will hold your love like a glass of water with trembling hands. We will be afraid to drink it because we are afraid we will spill it. We will be afraid to put it down because we are afraid you will take it away.

People like me will write about you.

We will write about you in our notebooks. We will write about you on the steam of our bathroom mirrors. We will write about you on the receipts we find in our pockets, on the backs of envelopes, on the dust on our windowsills. We will write about you in the language of devotion, the language of people who have been waiting their whole lives for someone to write about.

We will write poems about your hands, essays about your eyes, novels about the way you breathe, letters we will never send and stories we will never publish.

We will write about you because writing is the only way we know how to love. We will write about you because writing is the only way we know how to stay. We will write about you because writing is the only way we know how to keep something safe.

But here is the thing again,

We will write about you more than we will talk to you, write about you more than we will look at you, write about you more than we will hold you because writing is easier. We will write about you and we will not tell you. We will write about you and we will hide the pages. We will write about you and we will pretend we are not writing about you because if we show you you will see how much we love you and seeing how much we love you will terrify us because then, you will know how much power you have and then you might leave and we cannot survive being left again.

People like me will hold you like you are the only thing keeping them alive.

We will hold you in the morning when the light is soft and we are still half asleep. We will hold you in the evening when the sun is setting and the world is quiet. We will hold you like we are drowning and you are the shore. We will hold you like we are falling and you are the ground. We will hold you like we are lost and you are the map.

But here is the thing,

We will hold you too tight, like we are afraid you will disappear, like we are afraid you will evaporate, like we are afraid that the moment we let go, you will disappear.

We will hold you and we will not let go even when you need space, even when you need air, even when you need to breathe. We will hold you and we will call it love but it is fear, the fear of being alone again. It is the fear of waking up in an empty bed with no one to hold.

People like me will give you everything.

We will give you our hearts, we will give you our souls, the parts of ourselves we have never shown anyone else, our secrets, our fears, our dreams. We will give you the poems we wrote when we were seventeen and still believed in love. We will give you the scars we carry on our skin and the ones we carry inside.

We will give you everything because we have been saving it all for someone like you. We have been saving it all our whole lives. We have been waiting for someone who would be worthy of it and now you are here and we want to pour ourselves into your hands like water. We want you to drink us. We want you to be full of us.

But here is the thing,

We will give you everything and then we will be empty. We will give you everything and then we will have nothing left. We will give you everything and then we will disappear because that is what people like me do. We give and we give and we give until there is nothing left of us and then we wonder why we are alone.

We will give you everything and we will resent you for taking it. We will give you everything and we will blame you for not filling us back up. We will give you everything and we will be angry that you cannot do the same because people like me do not know how to receive. We only know how to give and giving is exhausting and giving is lonely and giving is the only way we know how to prove that we are worthy of love.

People like me will romanticize your absence.

We will write poems, essays, novels about the way you used to say our names. We will romanticize the distance between us. We will romanticize the silence. We will romanticize the longing. We will romanticize the ache. We will tell ourselves that absence makes the heart grow fonder. We will tell ourselves that distance is just a test. We will tell ourselves that the pain is proof that it was real. We will tell ourselves that the suffering is beautiful but the suffering is not beautiful. The suffering is just suffering. The absence is just absence. The distance is just distance and the pain is just the pain but people like me do not know how to love without suffering. We do not know how to love without longing. We do not know how to love without the ache of wanting something we cannot have because we grew up learning that love is something you survive. We grew up learning that love is something you earn. We grew up learning that love is something you bleed for and we have been bleeding for so long that we have forgotten what it feels like to not bleed.

People like me will leave you before you can leave us.

We will leave you because we are afraid you are going to leave us. We will leave you because we are afraid that if we stay, you will see how broken we really are. We will leave you because we are afraid that if we stay, you will stop loving us.

We will leave you and we will tell ourselves it is for your own good. We will leave you and we will tell ourselves that we are protecting you. We will leave you and we will tell ourselves that we are being selfless but we are not being selfless. We are being cowards. We are being afraid. We are being the same scared children we have always been.

We will leave you and we will spend the rest of our lives regretting it. We will leave you and we will write poems about the way you used to hold us. We will leave you and we will romanticize your absence. We will leave you and we will tell ourselves that we did the right thing.

But we did not do the right thing. We did the easy thing. And the easy thing is always the wrong thing.

People like me will watch you fall in love with someone else.

We will watch you fall in love with someone who is not us, we will watch you fall in love with someone who is whole, we will watch you fall in love with someone who is not broken, we will watch you fall in love with someone who does not write poems about you, we will watch you fall in love with someone who does not romanticize your absence, we will watch you fall in love with someone who does not leave you in the middle of the night.

We will watch you fall in love with someone else and we will not say anything,we will watch you fall in love with someone else and we will pretend we are happy for you, we will watch you fall in love with someone else and we will go home and we will write about it.

We will write about the way you looked at them. We will write about the way you smiled at them. We will write about the way you held their hand. We will write about the way you said their name. We will write about the way you were finally happy.

And we will tell ourselves that we are happy too, that we are happy that you found someone who could love you the way you deserved to be loved but we are not happy, we are not happy at all, we are broken, we are devastated, we are the same scared children we have always been and we are still writing.

Don't fall in love with people like me.

Don't fall in love with people like me because we will love you too much, we will love you in a way that is not sustainable, we will love you in a way that will consume us, we will love you in a way that will consume you, qe will love you in a way that leaves no room for anything else.

Don't fall in love with people like me because we will write about you more than we will talk to you. We will write about you more than we will hold you. We will write about you more than we will be with you. We will be so busy writing about you that we will forget to actually love you.

Don't fall in love with people like me because we will romanticize your absence. We will romanticize the distance. We will romanticize the longing. We will romanticize the pain. We will be so busy romanticizing the suffering that we will forget to enjoy the joy.

Don't fall in love with people like me because we will leave you. We will leave you in the middle of the night. We will leave you in the middle of a conversation. We will leave you in the middle of a sentence. We will leave you because we are afraid you are going to leave us.

Don't fall in love with people like me because we will break your heart. We will break your heart because our hearts are already broken. We will break your heart because we do not know how to hold something whole. We will break your heart because we have been broken for so long that broken is the only thing we know how to make.

Don't fall in love with people like me.

Please.

We are not worth it. We are not worth the pain. We are not worth the poetry. We are not worth the letters. We are not worth the obsession.

We are just people who have been hurt too many times. We are just people who have been alone too long. We are just people who do not know how to love without destroying and we do not want to destroy you.

So please.

Don't fall in love with people like me.

But if you do,

If you fall in love with people like me anyway, then hold us, even when we push you away, when we leave, when we write about you instead of talking to you. Hold us and do not let go, hold us until we understand that we are not going to be abandoned again, hold us until we understand that we are safe, hold us until we understand that we are loved.

And when we leave, when we inevitably leave, come find us. Come find us and bring us back. Come find us and tell us that it is okay. Come find us and tell us that we are not too broken to be loved. Come find us and tell us that you are not going to give up on us.

Till we finally believe it, finally stop running, and finally stay.

Don't fall in love with people like me but if you do,

Please.

Don't leave.

Please.

Don't leave.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

The salt water stings the open cuts on my feet but i keep running, the horizon is a clean line of blue cutting the sky in half. Behind us, the city is a burning heap of scrap metal but here, the wind whips my hair across my face, bright, blinding red in the sun looking so much like a match struck against the sky that for a second, I’m actually burning.

I laugh, a rattling sound that tears its way out of my throat scraping against the dry lining of my windpipe. It’s the laugh of a lunatic who just realised the prison gates were left unlocked by accident, the nightmare is over or maybe it’s just sleeping but right now, the sun is hitting the water and the glare is enough to blind a man.

We are running like people that forgot they had cages but the air doesn’t stay sweet for long and the scent of hope is a cheap perfume, it evaporates the second the sweat starts to sour on your skin. My lungs are two plastic bags filling up with broken glass, the world doesn’t let you have a clean escape, you can run to the edge of the earth and post your beautiful little monologues online, you can dye your hair and change your name but the dirt stays under your fingernails.

Every human soul is a dark cellar and no amount of ocean breeze can air out the rot. We think we are searching for freedom but we are only searching for a more comfortable chain.

The sand changes under our feet and stops being soft. It turns into a gray wet sludge, thick with the debris of a dying coast, shredded plastic, dead jellyfish liquefying in the heat, rusted needles half buried like teeth waiting for a heel.

I look at you. Your shirt is torn at the collar, showing the gray, bruised skin of your collarbone and you’re not laughing anymore, your mouth is a hard white line, your eyes fixed on something i can’t see.

We are so small, two pathetic shivering things trying to rewrite our sins against a backdrop of infinite water. We thought the water would wash us clean but water only drowns, only dissolves the soft parts until the bone is bare.

Then the ground just gives up.

The wet sand collapses into a jagged drop where the black rocks break through the surf like rusted knives, my foot catches on a weed-choked stone, the sound of dry wood snapping under a boot echoes but it’s inside my own leg, first comes the shock of a system shutting down. I pitch sideways.

My face meets the stone with a wet heavy thud. the impact splits my upper lip clean to the gum and suddenly the ocean smells like the metallic iron filling my mouth choking me as i try to draw a breath. I hear you scream my name.

I am looking at the water from an inch away now, my cheek pressed against the cold barnacles as they cut into my skin like tiny razors. The tide comes in, foaming with white scum and it washes directly over my face. It fills my eyes burning them blind with salt and pours down my throat mixing with the thick hot blood.

I try to lift my head but my neck feels like sand. Through the red watery blur of my left eye, I see the foam pulling back leaving strings of thick, dark crimson trailing across the gray stone sucked down into the black cracks where the small crabs wait. The sun keeps shining illuminating every single drop of the mess we made.

Look at me, a handful of minutes and a few inches of jagged stone are all it takes to reduce a soul to a whimpering dog dragging its broken meat through the slime and this is the great joke of our existence, we possess a mind that can comprehend the stars, a heart that can bleed for the abstract concept of beauty and yet we are entirely at the mercy of a wet rock, a single misstep, a tiny fracture in a calcium tube, and the grand philosophy evaporates.

They will tell you that suffering is holy. Go ask the man whose teeth are floating down his own throat if his spirit feels refined. Go ask the girl dying in a ditch if she feels closer to god.

Pain strips away the layers of civilization until nothing remains but the screaming nerve of self-preservation.

The true horror of human suffering is that it is so utterly useless, it teaches nothing that couldn’t be learned through kindness yet it is distributed with a crushing abundance. A child suffers a fever and dies, a good man is crushed by a cart, we run toward the ocean with "hope" in our lungs and end up with our faces split open on the barnacles. and the sun just keeps staring down indifferent to whether we are singing or choking on our own blood.

The man is a creature so deeply in love with his own misery that he will invent nightmares just to have something to weep over. We cannot handle peace, if you gave humanity everything we ever asked for, if you handed us a paradise where we had nothing to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy ourselves with the continuation of the species, we would still, out of sheer ingratitude and spite smash it all to pieces just to see the sparks. We would plunge knives into our own thighs just to feel something sharp break up the terrifying monotony of being safe.

We are cursed with the knowledge of what we could be, while being chained to what we are.

if you took away our suffering, what would be left of us? We wouldn’t know how to breathe without a weight on our chests. We create our own hells and decorate them with the scent of hope and then we run straight into them laughing like fools, because a beautiful nightmare is always better than the cold truth of nothingness.

Let the water take the blood, it’s an honest trade. We wanted to touch the infinite, didn't we?

Well, here it is, it tastes like salt and iron and it doesn't care if you forgive it.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Twinkle twinkle little star

Up above the world so far,

I found one lying in the grass

It was warm and it had mass

It was not a star at all

It was a fingernail that fell

From the hand I keep in jars

Twinkle twinkle little star

I asked my mother what you are

She said a diamond in the dark

I asked my father he said shush

The basement has a funny hush

I went downstairs to count the teeth

The ones I pulled from underneath

The floorboards where the bad men sleep

Twinkle twinkle little star

I wonder if you wonder too

What it feels like to be glued

To the ceiling of a room

Where no one comes to change the moon

Where the only light is small and red

From the clock beside the bed

Where the girl who looks like me lies still

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

A hole that lets the darkness through

An eye that blinked and never grew

A piece of sky that learned to fall

Into a well behind the mall

I keep your sisters in a row

They do not twinkle anymore

They just stare

Just stare

Just stare

Up above the world so bright

I drew a face on you last night

You blinked at me with ash and bone

And whispered you were not alone

That someone else was in the sky

A shape that matched the one I hide

Beneath my ribs behind my tongue

Twinkle twinkle little star

I think you are a silver scratch

A button from a dead man's patch

A shard of mirror from the crash

A tooth I lost and never found

It sank into the frozen ground

And now it lives up there with you

Rotting in a cradle too

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

If I could reach you from the yard

If I could pull you down and hard

Would you be soft? Would you be warm?

Would you fit inside my palm?

Would you hum a song I used to know

Before I learned that stars could grow

Inside the bellies of the ones

Who stare too long at the sun?

Twinkle twinkle little star

I have a ladder and a car

I have a rope and I have time

I have a reason and a rhyme

I will climb the tallest tree

I will carve your name in me

I will eat the light you give

I will learn the way to live

Inside the space where nothing is

Twinkle twinkle little star

I am not afraid of the dark

I am afraid of what leaves a mark

What twinkles is not always good

Sometimes it's blood on broken wood

Sometimes it's eyes behind the door

Counting freckles on the floor

Sometimes it's you

Sometimes it's me

Twinkle twinkle

Can't you see

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

I wonder if you wonder too

What it feels like to be true

To be the thing that children sing

When they don't know about the string

That pulls the stars down from the sky

And strings them up to watch them die

Twinkle twinkle little star

I know exactly what you are

You are the light that never reaches

You are the lesson no one teaches

You are the word I cannot say

The game I play

The price I pay

The star that fell

The wish I ate

The door that opened much too late

Twinkle twinkle

Little scar

Twinkle twinkle

Little star...

Twinkle twinkle little scar

How I wonder what you are.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

What is your favourite colour?

I don't want to assume blue. I know you.

I know blue isn't just blue with you but if it were the colour you carried in your chest then I would tell you that no blue in the entire world shines as bright as the blue in your eyes

(I know your eyes aren't blue, I know)

I don't mean the blue of summer skies, the blue of cornflowers, the blue of a child's crayon drawing of the ocean. I mean the sadness blue that lives beneath the surface of things.

Blue is often called the colour of the sky but that is a lie we tell children. Blue is the saddest colour on this planet. Do you know why? Because it is cold. Because it is deep. Because the oceans are blue and they contain multitudes of drowned things, ships, cities, prayers, people who swam too far from shore and couldn't find their way back. The sky is blue too and the sky is the loneliest thing I have ever seen.

Have you ever really looked at the sky?

It is just blue stretching on and on searching for something to hold. The sky and the ocean are mirrors, Two vast lonely blues staring at each other across the horizon and never merging, only reflecting their own endless hunger back and forth for eternity. That is blue.

That is the colour I see in your brown eyes when u look at you.

That is the colour I would die in.

But then, maybe you don't like blue. Maybe your favourite colour is green.

Green like the fields we pass every day on the way to nowhere in particular, the ones that blur past the window and make me think of what it would be like to lie down in all that softness and never get up. Green like the mountains that hold up the sky, green like the forest where I got lost once looking for pink wildflowers to make you a crown, green like the exact shade of the world right before it rains. Emeralds are green too by the way.

Emeralds are the colour of a heart that has been buried too long underground and come out more valuable for all the pressure it endured.

I would sell my own heart and place it still beating on a scale and name my price and I would use that price to buy you the brightest emeralds on this earth. Emeralds for your heart which is priceless. I would try so hard that I would strip my ribs bare and hand them to a jeweler and say, "Make something that says what I cannot say."

Or do you like brown?

The brown of earth after rain. The brown of tree bark, of coffee, of the soft soil where things are planted and things are buried and sometimes those two things are the same.

The brown of your hair in certain light, the brown of your eyes. I have stared so long that I have forgotten. I have memorized the map of your face and still I cannot tell you the exact colour of your eyes because when I look at them I stop seeing colour. I stop seeing anything but the feeling and the feeling is too big for a name.

Red?

No, it can't be red.

Red is too violent. Red is the colour of the blood that pools in my palm when I hold the knife by the blade and squeeze until I remember I am real.

Red is the colour of the inside of things, the hidden part, the part we are not supposed to show.

Red is the colour of too much.

But if it were red, if your favourite colour were the colour of life bleeding out of a wound then I would offer you my blood. I would open my veins like a river and say, "Here, take it. It is the brightest red you will ever find." But I am afraid it would be too much.

I am afraid you would spill it because people cannot handle too much, their hands shake, they topple things over, they fall.

Like Atlantis fell.

The city that loved the ocean too much and was swallowed by it. The city where I am always drowning.

So tell me your favourite colour, blue, green, brown, red, something I haven't named, I will swim to every drowned city in every ocean on this burning planet and I will find you the colour with the only thing I have left that is dear to me.

My life, this pulse in my wrists that beats your name in morse code even when I am sleeping.

I will swim down. I will hold my breath and push into the dark water and I will not look back.

I will hope that the love in my chest is enough to fuel the blood in my body to keep moving forward.

I will push the water aside with my bare hands, make a path for my heart which is already swimming ahead of me and then somewhere in the green blue black of the ocean floor where the lost cities sleep and the silence is so loud it sounds like a scream, I will hear your name and without thinking, without hesitating I will open my mouth to reply.

I'm here.

I'm here. I came for you. I would come for you a thousand times. I would drown in every ocean on every planet in every universe just to hear you say my name once more.

But the water doesn't care about the love in my chest or the blood in my veins. The water pours in and fills my mouth. It fills my throat. It fills my lungs, my lungs which were supposed to be fueled by love, which were supposed to carry me through this, which were supposed to be enough. The water is cold and it is everywhere and it is inside me now, replacing the air, replacing the love, replacing everything I thought would save me.

I would cry.

I would cry the way I cried as a child when the world was too loud and no one came to hold me. I would cry the way I cried when you left the first time and the second time, and every time after that. I would cry the way the sky cries when it is too full of blue and has to break open just to survive but crying is useless when you are already in the water. When you are the water. When your body is ninety percent longing and ten percent salt and the ocean is ninety percent salt and ten percent longing and the two of you have merged into something that cannot be separated.

The ocean doesn't need my tears.

They don't even count. I can't even wipe them away. My whole body is slick with tears, my hands, my heart, still beating in my chest, pumping blood that is the brightest red you've ever seen trying to get to you even as everything else is failing.

Nobody can wipe my tears away. Nobody is coming to wipe my tears away. I am alone in the deep with the weight of my love pressing down on me like the entire sky and the entire ocean and the entire grief of every person who ever loved someone who couldn't love them back.

And then my chest caves in. My body trying to save itself even though my soul has already surrendered, lungs try to expel the water, try to throw it up, try to make room for air that is not there and this only pulls more water in.

I choke, and thrash.

I am drowning in an ocean of my own making and I don't even remember choosing to swim.

What's happening?

Wasn't the blood supposed to fuel my lungs? Wasn't the love supposed to keep me going? I have so much love in my chest I can barely eat. I have so much love in my chest I can barely think of anything but you, your face, your voice, the exact shade of your favourite colour, the way you once looked at me and I felt seen for the first time in my entire existence. I have so much love it spills out of me in everything I write, every scar I trace, every glass of water I drink hoping it will finally be enough to quench the thirst and still it wasn't enough.

See me.

I am down here. I am the one who asked about your favourite colour. I am the one who promised to bring you emeralds.

See me.

I am still here, my lungs are full of water and my chest is full of love and I cannot tell the difference between the two anymore.

My body is sinking.

My heart is still rising.

Pull me up.

Reach down and grab my hand. Pull me out of this,out of myself. Pull me into the warm,m air and let me cough the ocean out of my lungs and let me breathe and let me live and let me look at you and say your name with a mouth that is not full of water.

See me.

See me.

Pull me up.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

*naiyak* kamusta ka?

to say that I'm fantastic would be a lie so I'll just say somewhere between feeling nothing and everything all at once (*hugs*)

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

Then what is heaven?

Heaven is being able to love. Heaven is loving you.

I am a ridiculous person and I have always known it but I am your ridiculous person and that is the only dignity I need.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Why do I get to breathe?

I am sitting in a room with four walls and a ceiling that does not fall and I am breathing.

Somewhere, a mother is counting her children's limbs. She started with ten fingers, ten toes, two arms, two legs, a head full of curls that smelled like sleep.

She is down to a number I cannot write because poetry fails where bodies begin.

"In the heart of the wound, a child is drawing a sun that looks like a tank."

And I? I am drawing nothing. I'm scrolling through reels with my thumb moving faster than my conscience can catch.

The child with the sun that looks like a tank has stopped drawing. His hands are under the rubble now, the sun is still on paper with a yellow crayon snapped in the middle and somewhere a crayon factory is still making yellow crayon and somewhere a child is using one to draw a sunflower and somewhere I am still breathing.

Why?

There is no anesthesia, only one doctor who has not slept in three days and a child who will not live to see four.

The doctor is crying, he has forgotten how to stop and he says, "I'm sorry. We have nothing to give you but this."

The child looks at the doctor with eyes that have already seen more than most adults and says, "It's okay, I'm not scared, mama said there are no bombs in heaven."

I am in my room with four walls and a ceiling that doesn't fall and I am crying but my tears don't bring back the kids. My tears are just water and water is a luxury in war.

Why do I get to live?

I have done nothing to earn this. I was not braver than the children of Gaza, I was not more deserving than the mothers who held their babies through the night and woke up to find them cold, I was not more righteous than the fathers who dug through concrete with their bare hands and pulled only pieces.

There are only children, only bombs, only parents digging graves with their bare hands and there is only me trying to make art out of the unmakeable and the children don't need my poems, they need the graves to stay empty, they need to learn addition instead of subtraction.

I cannot give them that.

I saw you and I did nothing and I am sorry, I am so sorry. I am the sorriest person alive and my sorrow doesn't rebuild you a home.

We remember you, we fail you.

We remember you, we fail you.

We fail you, we remember you.

Forgive me. Forgive us.

The field is full of bodies, and I am one of them. I am lying on my back and the sky is so blue.

"How dare you be beautiful," I whisper to the sky, "How dare you be beautiful while we are down here becoming earth."

A bird lands on my chest, it thinks I'm earth. I let it sit there because I want to be useless even dead.

"I'm not special." I tell the bird, it flies away after pecking at me. I don't fly after it.

"The war will end, the leaders will shake hands, the old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son."

I am not the son, I am not the mother, I am not the leader or the handshake or the war that ends.

I am the moment the body realizes it's no longer a body, blood drawn like new nations and a heart that keeps beating long after the treaty is signed because nobody told it the war was over.