chasing ghosts

sideblog for mads brock-pedersen ooc only

[7172626728388918928292991972-de]

yall coping ?

[dongboss]

no

[inkskinned]

You know it is unreciprocated, but she holds so much space in your ribs. She is folding a napkin to tuck under her plate. She has a habit of pushing her hair back behind one ear, only for it to slip back in front of her face the next second. The sun hits her like a halo. Her artist hands skip over silverware.

You want to say: you make me feel like temple, like holy ground.

Two weeks ago while box-wine drunk, she lay down next to you on your ugly rug and wrapped her hands in yours and whispered "it must be an honor, being yours"

you want to say: being around you sets embers under my tongue. Being around you is a snakebite.

Last Tuesday she waltzed with you in the kitchen & slid her hands over yours and spun you and kissed you on the cheek.

You want to say: I cannot come to you if I don't know how much you're calling. I know you are used to less gentle desires. But I am not hunting.

You say: "How's it going?"

She tells you about her life and you listen because you love her voice and you want to be there and you want her in your arms. You will not act first. You don't want to hurt her. You are probably imagining all of her affection. She is probably just always flirty with friends.

You eat instead of confessing. She draws one finger over your cheek to catch a fleck of pepper. You feign snapping at her finger, she cackles. She tells the waiter - yes more wine! we are on a date!

It isn't the feeling that is snapping your spine in tiny jaws. It's the almost of it all. Does she even know? Are you just her problem? She is a soft space to you. Your first and last thought. Are you reading it all wrong. (Of course you are).

You make her laugh because you'd eat your whole hand to make her laugh and you can't make eye contact because her eyes are so lovely they render you inert and close your throat. You nod about her boyfriend and don't tell her to leave him, to pick up and go. You try fries off her plate and she smacks your hand, just a little, and starts a tiny food fight - she steals one of your onion rings every time you take a fry.

You say - hang on lemme get a picture of you. This is how you make an excuse to stare at her, and her hair, and the smirk she is always wearing. You want to say - just kill me. I have spent so long aching for you that it would be easier, the dying.

Instead you say - "Perfect."

You know it's unrequited. But how lovely to imagine saying - please. Be mine.

[lifeinpoetry]

“… shame and loneliness are almost one. Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.”

— Fanny Howe, from “Loneliness,” Second Childhood: Poems

[8-bitfiction]

[keepmyheadstraight]

[dramaticallydepressed]

disloyal order of water buffaloes // fall out boy

[inkskinned]

I have been thinking about the ways the heart has muscle memory; how we love in grooves. How it can be so easy to slip back into bad habits because the body remembers the mistake as passion. How good it feels to talk to you, even though it's only through zoom. How easy some friends are to just pick back up with, like we were never apart, like we were born for it. How I have been loved on memory alone, how I have been loved like a favorite meal, how I have been loved like a mess.

How love can become taken for granted; how we can become so familiar with someone that we assume everything is functioning; how scared we are when we need to learn to move on. When the heart has loved someone, it is hard to learn to be alone again - it has to love around the spaces it got used to having filled. Retrains all the fine motor skills.

My mom says sometimes people just... Outgrow each other. This is a type of muscle memory, too. You can love and care for someone and they still won't be right for you. You wake up one day and your heart is ready to lift something else. Or you wake up and I'm not the same person and you don't have the energy to learn to love me again. It happens.

She warned me once that I am overly fond of keeping people just because I like the comfort of love. That I'll let someone hurt me over and over because it's easier to slide back than it is to move on. I tell her - if my heart is a muscle, I have trained it to be strong. I will keep loving people even when they are wrong. I will keep loving people loudly and I will keep messing up and I will have a heart that can lift them all.

She says - you still carry all that weight, though. What would happen if you could love without it? What form would your heart take? What if she was free? When you let her move unburdened, what else could you love? Who would you be?

[queerlysad]